I've followed Piwigo development for a long time, installed previous versions many times, but Gallery always worked better for my purposes.  With more recent developments including the transition to Gallery 3, and improvements to Piwigo, I've recently decided to migrate all my photos to Piwigo.  This is going to take months as I want to re-edit most of my photos and do a better job with tagging.  Below are just a few comments about my switch.  I just want to add that I do like both applications and I'm not trying to say one is better than the other for all purposes.

Piwigo 2.1.0 was probably the most significant improvement for me.  Many of
the fixes made over the last 6 months are what made Piwigo usable, whereas
before it was just missing too many features for me to switch from Gallery.
Over a longer period of time, some of the big improvements for me were not even
necessarily improvements in the applications itself.  Better documentation,
bigger user community, and very active development (bug fixes and feature
enhancements) all have made a big difference.

Here's a rough outline of some of the other improvements or features that have made a major difference for me.

Installation:

Easier, w/ fewer issues.
Better documentation

Appearance / User Features

Themes (more themes and better themes, easier customization)

Overall customizations (more and easier, modern interface enhancements like
auto-complete when assigning tags and drag/drop reorganization of
categories...very nice and definitely improve usability)

Extensive customization of image data and interface options displayed.  This is
very important as I think everyone wants something different and no one wants to
have to edit code to make these kinds of changes.

Upload via web (I still have some issues with this but a crucial feature in my
opinion, nice implementation so far)

Tag cloud.  Great feature.

Exif data.  How this is handled and displayed is a deal breaker for me.  I
wouldn't use a gallery that didn't display exif or didn't have the flexibility
to change what fields are displayed.  The exif extension allows nice
customization of what is displayed and it actually works!

Menu - Good implementation and another critical feature

Ability to turn many features off.  I'm running a site strictly for my own
photos, not for other users and being able to turn off features like
registration and user not only keeps the interface uncluttered, but also
improves security.

Features or improvements still desired (some that are still keeping me from just
migrating my whole gallery today)

Improvements to web upload.  I should be able to work around that until some
enhancements are made. (since writing this I decided to mount my .galleries folder as a remote collection in Digikam.  This eliminates a separate transfer step and allows me complete control over the web size images and I manage the whole photo directory structure in Digikam)  Still would like to see improvements to web upload though.

Exif.  One thing I don't see any gallery software doing yet is importing exif
data as tags.  Piwigo already has the tag cloud so why not have the exif data
read in as tags (or at least have that as a configurable option).  This would
allow one to easily filter on useful data such as the camera lens, ISO, shutter
speed, camera model, etc. Having exif read in as tags would be much easier than
creating those tags and assigning them.

Metadata/Tags  .  Improved ability to manipulate and use metadata.  This is
crucial when you have thousands of photos.  The tag cloud is great but being
able to filter and build things with metadata would be useful also.  An example
might be creating a default view based on metadata...say making your root album
be a filter displaying images taken with a particular lens (exif data used as
tags).  Another example would be creating a menu that displays tags the way the
administrator wants them displayed.  The more photos in a gallery the more
important metadata becomes and the flexibility to do a lot of things with that
metadata is important.

File naming.  I'm not sure I understand why Piwigo renames the actual files
uploaded.  There may be a very good reason for this but it's confusing to me and
I worry about the ability to quickly find photos at the filesystem level, when I
have thousands and they have all been named differently than the photos I
uploaded.  I'll submit a forum post with more detail about this.

Ability to sort images by name in Piwigo, not just by file name.

I've been trying to post separate requests for many of the above items in the appropriate forum.

Overall though I just wanted to thank the developers and the community for producing such a great product.  I look forward to seeing all the future improvements and continuing to use Piwigo.

Vern
http://vw.homelinux.net/z
http://vw.homelinux.net/g2

Last edited by rbr28 (2010-07-15 03:51:40)