Alright, here we go, once again. Time for ANOTHER photo gallery update. I love using WordPress to host my occasional news column. It takes so much work out of the equation and lets me just play. In the past, I have used Gallery by Menalto for photo handling needs. And it was good, no doubt about it. I used Gallery 1, and then migrated over to Gallery 2. I believe they are currently on version 3.0 at this time. However, Gallery didn’t play well with WordPress so I made the decision to look for ones that do work with WordPress. And, thus, the saga began.

I used NextGEN gallery for a while. The publisher went through several updates and I was quite happy with it. Except, it seemed a bit more than what I needed. It felt like using a $300,000 cotton combine to pick some roadside flowers. Know what I mean? Going fishing with a Howitzer. I really just needed something simple. And now I’m trying WP Photo Albums Plus. So far, so good. I like the simplicity, I like the customization, and I like the photo handling. In fact, I’ve been able to migrate over most of my old albums to this new one in just a very short amount of time. I can imagine sticking with this one for a while. Unless …

Unless something comes along that has a true mobile phone component. Look, Facebook has it down. You snap a quick pic with your cell phone, hit one button, and *BOOM* it is on your Facebook page within a set gallery. And it is so easy to do this on the fly without having to use sixteen different routing methods. Just one click, and done. WordPress has a very nice mobile app, but it does NOT handle photos well at all. Sure, you can insert a single picture into a single post, but thhose pictures are not kept in any sort of organization folder at all. So, you can’t really keep up with those photos once you published that post. There are several publishers working on this currently, but there is no set date for when they might be availible.

I’ll be honest here. I have no loyalty to any one program. The first publisher to provide a decent working solution on the Android platform is probably going to get my business. I just want a simple solution. Something that requires less than 15 clicks to get a photo into an existing gallery and on my site. And really, this could be as simple as a server side program that reads a folder and pulls any images out of it. Then the phone-side program simply uploads the photo in question to that directory on the server. In my mind it seems simple. But, then again, I have zero Java coding experience, zero iPhone/iOS coding experience, zero Ajax coding experience … and, well, let’s just say I have zero knowledge of coding in the modern world. So, what seems simple to me could be a very complex problem. Or maybe I’m just the only nerd with a self-hosted WordPress site who wants Facebook-like functionaltiy without just using Facebook (or Picasa, or Flikr, or any other number of online photo albums). I am a control freak; I like for everything to be on my site, under my direct control.

Is that so bad?

PS: Click on the link for the Photo Galleries! I don’t have all the pictures uploaded yet, but I will keep working.