As I've used a few different galleries through my blogging days and beyond, I've found a few basics I want to find in a web gallery:

1. Ease-of-use. The gallery has to work in an easy way, both for the viewer and the administrator. The point of a gallery is to show pictures, and for me, to show the ones available in an easy way. E.g., this gallery is very easy to use, you get a sense of which pictures are available in a very easy way.

On the other hand, you have my latest gallery, where it's hard to see the pictures available (except for the large, main one momentarily displayed), but where you have...

2. Great functions. I like the "intelligence" behind flickr, Gallery and Coppermine, even the flashiness of my latest gallery; you can view photos as slide-shows, have the screen size automatically adapt according to the size of the picture shown, search for pictures and picture-sets, add notes to your pictures, let people comment on your pictures individually, et.c.

These are all great functions. Yet I have a few issues with the technology behind the sophisticated galleries I've found.

First, they take a lot of time to implement. Coppermine was easy to install and configure, but I abandoned it due to the amount of time I had to spend creating a whole gallery. Gallery was a very tough cookie to try and install, and even though I've tried it both in a Windows environment (a process which can only be described as suicidal, as I wasn't using an Apache web server) and a Red Hat Linux/Apache environment, it didn't work. Sure, I'm lazy, but I like to be just so when it comes to my own devices. I'm not making a picture library for a company here, these are pictures I just wanna frame online, so to speak. I'm not very into tagging pictures, adding nifty search-words, but I do like a function to let people send the pictures as postcards (Coppermine), letting them comment the pictures by scribbling on the very picture (flickr) and the ability to very easily upload a lot of pictures in a very easy way (Gallery).

3. Disaster-safe. Say your entire site gets devoured by an American christian right-winger. What then? Will it be easy to repair your web galleries or will you have to sift through database hell and make loads of phone-calls to all computer-savvy you know in order to get through? As I work with IT on many levels, I often deal with people - admins and users alike - who ask for help when something's been deleted, disrupted or destroyed. When somebody says "Oh, I never make back-ups, haha!" I don't think they're funny, as I've been through enough data disasters myself. That person will almost inevitably be the very same on the telephone to you days or even years later, shrieking hysterically, craving your wizard-like capabilities to restore what is suddenly dead and gone - and here's where I get my wry laugh. This is getting a bit philosophical and off-topic, but deserves its space none the less, so remember one of the top five Microsoft advices you're likely to get: save often, and back-up. It's a bit zen, like "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" - easy - but remember it if you're dealing with these questions.

The same thing applied when I moved my blog from my own server at home, to be hosted by Livingdot. Moving a blog from one server to another may sound simple, but when the database that contains all my posts, references to images, et.c. had to be revised it turned out to be a hell-hole of immense proportions. When you don't have a very cluttered blog you're fine, but when you're meddling with different kinds of plug-ins, java script-dependencies and routines that make your database corrupt (i.e. non-useable) it's a bit hard. Well, I made it through after a few days of nastiness, but the point is this: if you carry a web photo gallery that's very sophisticated, chances are you really should know what you're doing when, and preferably, before, you're setting it up. What if you have to move, restore or migrate your web gallery? Keep that question in mind before picking your gallery.

So, if you have any great ideas on a good web gallery, comment this, by all means. There are people working with WordPress plug-ins to solve this mayhem, too; I hope patGal gets underway, for example.

Anyway, how's this for a new gallery structure? A very simple, scaled-off HTML-based little gallery. For sure, there's only four pictures in that one, but there'll be more galleries based on this layout coming.

By the way, Mikaela and I are as sick as ever. She's worse off than I, and I'm still far from well. I think I'll be able to head off to work tomorrow, which I have to in order to get things going, anyway. Nowadays I don't have too many problems when I have too much to do. A few years ago I tried to finish and sort everything out at once. Now, I sort out the priorities and let the stuff that's the least important slack, which is a must. The tough bit is when you don't have enough time to even prioritise, but I think that it all really boils down to one question: which is more important, your work or your health? If you even take time to answer that, you have to think about how you should percieve work; think about this - who will benefit if you're burned out and can't work? Neither your boss or you.