life freestyle or get caught …

So I am setting up a Drupal  based webpage. I need a few plugins and the one causing the most trouble was the image gallery plugin. There seem to be two well maintained ones. One is

• Gallery Assist, and the other is
• Image Gallery, which is part if the Image module

Both have different ways of managing their images/files.

Gallery Assist

Gallery Assist builds image galleries per user. A folder structure is created containing images grouped by gallery and user. Those galleries are nodes. This module does not support sub galleries as far as I know. There are very interesting extension modules listed for Gallery Assist (in the project description). That makes Gallery Assist rather compelling.

Image/File Management:

Images are stored grouped by user and gallery in sites/default/gallery_assist/<user_id>/gallery<user_id><gallery_id>. This allows exporting galleries more easily than when using the Image Gallery module.

Multiple File Upload:

There are two modules adding multiple image upload to Gallery Assist.

• One requires Image FUpload and is called Image FUpload for Gallery Assist. It simply adds a multi file upload menu entry to the gallery editing dialog.
• The other is a plugin called Gallery Assist Upload and Import Helper. It allows uploads based on an import folder and even supports *.zip files. It works together with IMCE, which is a file explorer for Drupal. I did not try this module yet. I may, with time.

Permissions:

As galleries are nodes, standard node permission systems can be used to manage permissions for those galleries (such as Content Access).

Image Gallery

Image Gallery is based on Images as nodes. Those nodes are grouped into galleries. This module supports sub galleries. The Image module comes with a few other interesting sub modules. Also there is a variety of other modules using Image, that might make this module interesting.

Image/File Management:

The images are stored in sites/default/files/images without any folder structure. That would make exporting galleries later a matter of data base work, which is a pain.

Multiple File Upload:

There are two options for Image Gallery to import images:

• One is the module Image Import, which is included in the Image module and allows to specify a folder where images can be stored and imported. This requires FTP access. Once the images are uploaded they are deleted from the import folder and added as nodes. A nice feature there is that galleries can be automatically created based on the sub folder structure in the import folder.
• The other uses the module Image FUpload. This module modifies the Image creation dialog to allow for multiple file upload. Yet it disables the publish check box. This means that every image needs to be explicitly published later. If one forgets to specify a Gallery the uploaded images are to be part of then each image needs to be painstakingly set to be part of a gallery. One image cannot be part of several galleries.

Permissions:

The module Image Gallery Access based on ACL allows permission management.

Gallery

The module Gallery embeds the separate system Gallery2 in Drupal. And seems very sophisticated and feature-rich. Yet as it requires PHP safe_mode=off I was not able to test it.

Conclusion

Both Gallery Assist and Image Gallery are modules that work nicely if used correctly. I think Image Gallery is a little over the top with storing each image as a node crowding the content. Also its file management is not easily exportable. Also nags like having to set the images gallery one by one if forgotten when creating uploading images is a pain. The lack of sub galleries (even though I might just not have found that feature yet) is a little negative for Gallery Assist. But galleries are nodes, something might be done here (I am not a Drupal pro yet). I will use Gallery Assist for now based on ease of use and less content crowding. Let's see how it turns out. The module Gallery would probably be a nice alternative, but is no option for me due to the required PHP safe_mode=off.

If anybody has nice alternatives to the mentioned gallery modules or tips and hints, please let me know.