I had a long standing project, it was a Christmas present a year ago for my family. The ideas was simple, and cheap. I just needed to find the right software to run it all. I went through a bunch of them. Some gallery stuff already installed on my web-server, and a few others that I downloaded. The main thing I needed was batch uploading for the photos. I settled on the Coppermine software.

The Review:

Installation was easy. I had a couple hick-ups with the custom style, but once I actually read how to create it, it was a breeze. I had some odd refresh problems in the admin area changing the site settings when I was expanding and collapsing the individual setting groups.

So I finally had everything set up and was ready to upload the pictures. I have to say that I don’t really care for the batch uploading. I had a common bug with the database resizing and making thumbnails for the pictures - it didn’t work, the controls are a little clunky on it, for that matter, the whole admin section is not quite there. I got all my pictures on the site, threw a couple in the different sections of the site and sent an email to my family to get their pictures ready. I spent 4 hours on Skype with my sister trying to get her pictures on the site. Nothing was working for her, a lot of this I later figured out was her computer, but it should not have been that hard. I ended up having to make her a full admin (which is the only type of account that can use batch uploading) and talking her through how to use FTP.

Overall, out of 10 I would give the software a 6. It works, it’s easy and there is a decent amount of information on how to fix any problems you might run across. It has some nice user side functions, and a lot of plug-ins are available for the existing features, and add-ons.

Visit the site: JWD-Photos.com

drjonesdesign.com

The site is primarily constructed with CSS/XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The inline pop-ups are courtesy of phatfusion.net. It is a pretty sweet piece of code, that goes above and beyond lightbox. It is capable of showing basically anything in the popup, in my case, simple html files.

drjonesblog.com

My blog is Wordpress software, with a custom theme I created to match my website. The newest version of Wordpress was extremely easy to install and customize, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in starting a blog.