Photo Gallery Part 7: Current Thoughts

There is still more photo gallery software that I would like to try out, but I have not had time to do so over a long weekend. That has given me some time to think about how it is going, and I would like to organize my current thoughts in this blog entry.

I started by trying out PiGallery 2 because it looked interesting and I did not think it would take long to test. I did not realize how much the anchor would affect my opinions of the user interfaces of the software that I test afterwards. The PiGallery 2 user interface for viewing photos and videos is quite good. Aside from a flicker issue during transitions, I like it better than Google Photos! When I try out other photo gallery software, especially software that renders photos within a page layout instead of a lightbox, I am likely quite critical because I compare the experience to that of PiGallery 2.

The list of software that I selected to try out is still quite long, but I realized that I should filter it again. Some software looks really promising, but I have found that it does not support some essential features. Download functionality is essential because some family members download and print photos to show other family members who do not use computers. Video support is essential because family members really enjoy seeing and hearing the kids, especially in this time when international travel is so difficult.

For example, fgallery looks pretty promising. Chris Horn uses it on his website, and it looks nice. It does not appear to support video, however, so I am removing it from the list.

One thing that has come as a surprise is how difficult it is to design authentication and user accounts to work well for my needs. I think that most photo gallery software is designed for different needs, and I have realized that it is often preferable to use “public” albums in the photo gallery software and authenticate separately to protect them.

Basic authentication is often used for this, but I realized that it would not be difficult to write a proxy server to authenticate with Google using OAuth, perhaps using the hoauth2 library. Such things probably already exist, and I indeed quickly found oauth2-proxy as well as many tutorials for doing this with NGINX. Great! This will allow me to provide a Google Photos alternative without having to burden family members with additional login credentials.