What is PHP Gallery 2?
PHP Gallery 2 is a web-based management system
for storing pictures and other documents such as movies and flash files. While it is not designed for storing documents such as Microsoft Word or PDF, it serves as a simple storage container for those as well and will even automatically create thumbnails for PDFs if you have ImageMagick installed. It is similar to Gallery 1 except unlike Gallery 1, the meta data of documents
is stored in a database as opposed to the file system. Documents are still stored in the file system.
Gallery is Open Source software licensed under GPL. Details here.
We've been using Gallery 2 for various projects over the past year or so because it has been fairly easy to integrate
into our PHP applications.
Below is the list of features we like most about it:
- Supports one of our favorite databases and those other 2 - PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle.
Minor gripe - you can tell from the docs that there is a MySQL bias.
- Cross-Platform - will work anywhere PHP works.
- It uses PHP ADODB as the database abstraction layer.
- It uses Smarty Templating engine.
- Lots of Plugins to choose from - we'll go over our favorites later
- When you upload a high-res image it automatically creates 2 other sizes (thumbnail and regular web view)
