Originally we hosted our images on the now-defunct council-funded NORCAN website. This purpose-designed system had one or two nice features, including powerful searching and the ability to set “hotspots” within images. However, it was opaque to the outside world (including Google) and did not support bulk uploads or downloads. It couldn’t import existing metadata, and didn’t store full-size images for archival purposes. It was a great example of how to waste public money failing to reinvent the wheel.
So we also experimented with Google Picasa Web Albums. Thanks to the Picasa desktop software, this has good support for metadata, bulk transfers, backups and image editing. Searchability was rather poor, and the limit on the number of photos per album was a pain. The multi-user aspect is limited too: other users could upload and edit their own photos, but any particular image could only be edited by its owner.
In July 2011 we moved to a Menalto Gallery3 database on our own server. Gallery3 had the advantages of being simple to set up. It just about met our needs, was easy to administer, and ran happily for just over three years.
Around August 2014 the developers of Gallery3 announced that the software would no longer be maintained. We therefore migrated to Piwigo in October 2014. Piwigo is a popular replacement for Gallery3 and the move was easy. The new gallery works much better on mobile devices and gives the adminstrators more power, though the learning curve is steeper.
The ideal would be to integrate the gallery fully into CMS Made Simple, or perhaps alternatively to use a “museum-class” CMS such as Greenstone, dspace, EPrints or Fedora. The latter would provide better searchability and support for more types of metadata, and allow us to catalogue scanned documents as PDFs with embedded text. But they are more complex to set up, and we don’t have the expertise. The
would welcome any offers of help.
