The time has come, the walrus said...

I'm ditching the Gallery2 installation at my greg-willis.com website. I've had my photos in some form of Gallery for about five years. Back then there wasn't any other solution that seemed viable and extensible. And since Gallery was on my own server, I needn't worry about some other company going out of business and taking my photos in the process.

So why the ditch? Two reasons. First, performance. Simply put, Gallery2 was a beast. After I enabled the Gallery module in Drupal 6, my pages took twice as long to load. My sites without Gallery are fast, those with are slow. Now maybe someone with more server tuning skills than mine could improve it, but that's not the point. I've been able to get my Drupal sites acting spryly, but Gallery was a bit too opaque for me to do much with.

But I was willing to take the performance hit as long as it fit in with the plans of my website. I wanted an embedded gallery, and I consider Gallery2 the best experience for that -- for admin and viewer -- out there. Now I've rethought that. Going forward, I'm going to have a more content-rich website. Because I'm going to be more text-heavy, the embedded gallery is no longer a priority. If it weren't for the performance issues I'd probably keep it.

So where are all the pretty pictures going? Flickr, my friend. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregw66/, to be more specific. Although I have my reservations about giving a company power over my photos, the benefits now outweigh the costs. And since all my photos ultimately reside in Adobe Lightroom, I can always just re-spin my gallery somewhere else.

So farewell, Gallery2. I wish you leaner and faster times ahead.