For some time I’ve used Gallery as my gallery software of choice. (And I still do–you can find the link to my gallery along the page header). But more recently, I’ve started to think that what I’d prefer to have is software which makes it easy to create scrapbooks online. I think the key difference here is the focus on narrative instead of the pictures themselves. Pictures are used to tell the story, not to be the primary point of the content. I’m happy to have a gallery at the same time which is highly integrated with the scrapbook, but I’d like the narrative (with collections of photos related to narrative parts) to allow presentation in a scrapbook format.
If anyone is aware of such software (particularly, but not strictly, free software), please let me know.
I was using the gallery last night to try to edit our pictures from the shore…it is a cumbersome interface, and not well designed for making a series of comments, like I tried to do, especially when you’re working with 150 pictures per event. I gave L. the software from Creative Memories a few years ago, but I don’t know that it is useful for making a web scrapbook, just getting photos ready for your own paper scrapbooks. We’d have to check and see if she ever used it.
It is a good question, and we can certainly look into it.
-S.
The nice thing about Gallery is that it’s extensible. You could write a Gallery 2 module which provides the features you need.
Of course that needs some work so this makes only sense if you want to keep using Gallery by all means or if there’s really no alternative that provides the features you need out of the box.
Should you indeed not find any solutions for your application, then I suggest you start by writing down the requirements and create 1, 2 mock-ups of how it should look / work. Based on that, one could develop the solution. Be it as Gallery module, as a module for another CMS (e.g. Drupal) or as a standalone application.
BTW: I’ve already seen web-comics based on Drupal.