I have some friends from Florida coming to Bulgaria on Monday! Check back for their reactions to Eastern Europe, where we end up taking them and some pictures of course.

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