And so far so good on the basketball game… though I’m much more excited about the women’s game this weekend than tonight’s game.

If you breakdown Flickr, you don’t have to worry albums or hierarchical relationships. You just upload the image, set the title and tags and you’re off and running. Granted Gallery gives you more options and more flexibility, but if you don’t need those features, you can’t use a basic version of it (whose functionality is similar to the core of Flickr). Gallery is powerful but its core needs to be stronger and more central, IMO.

Gotta run… Duke vs. Clemson in 3 minutes =)

Here is a quick observation, though, that I think encapsulates why merely splitting some things out into plugins isn’t the whole solution. Take a look at the ‘general options’ page for wordpress 2.1 and the ‘general settings’ page for gallery 2.1. Cutting and pasting the config text into my text editor, I see that gallery’s general settings page has 59 lines and 826 words; wordpress’s general settings page has 24 lines and 131 words. Gallery should aspire to that kind of brevity in its core functionality.

Maybe a good gallery rule of thumb might be to look at Flickr and Wordpress, and for every core gallery feature or config option, say ‘is this in flickr or wordpress?’ and if the answer is ‘no’, then there had better be a really, really, really good reason why it should go in the core. (This might get rid of the redundant ‘Title’ and ‘Summary’, for example.)

[Tangentially, after staring some more at both config options, I think part of my reaction may also be attributable to the layout- WP's bigger default fonts in the admin section and cleaner layout might make the various options easier to grok by default, even when they are basically the same options. Making things beautiful and legible helps usability.]

That being said, Gallery 2 is pretty much as complicated as you make it, don’t install plugins you don’t need. The next version, v2.2, will include a Downloadable Plugin system that lets you install plugins directly from the Gallery 2 interface, without having to install them manually. I’m sure that will make it easier for most of our users, and it also lets us minimize the core package to only include the bare minimum of features.

My main complaint with gallery is probably less installation (which isn’t bad, though not quite as one-step-and-you’re-done as wordpress) and more immediate post-installation- they haven’t learned ‘less is more’ on the configuration front yet.

Just some settings gallery makes me set that there is no equivalent of in wordpress:
* embedded markups
* cookies
* locking system
* helper processes
* filesystem permissions
* modules have to be ‘installed’, then ‘activated’- given that I’ve already installed it by putting it in the modules dir, why do I have to click twice to actually activate it?
* compare wp’s url rewrite screen and gallery’s
* rss configuration: again, compare/contrast
* EXIF data: huge screen. Should be default be a three-entry checkbox: don’t use it, use all of it, use some very basic subset.

I could go on, but I have class to go to ;)

(I agree, UI-wise, that Flickr is light-years ahead of Gallery. But if that were my criteria, I’d be using OS/X to upload to flickr too.)

However, I also couldn’t come up with any reason at all why it was better than Flickr. So when I changed my web server setup a few months back, I just dumped the gallery and moved to Flickr instead. It works, it’s faster, I don’t have to worry about upgrading it. *shrug*