<rant>
This category of software is a pretty good example of "just because you can - doesn't mean you should." In other words, there are far too many of these programs and almost all of them suck. The problem is that there are so many that it becomes difficult to pick a good one without wasting time wading through 3 or 4 that are a complete waste of everybody's time.

I know I shouldn't rag on people for trying to do the right thing, but in this case I think people are actually hurting the open source community by releasing yet another half-baked project which will suck resources that might be better focussed on one or two that have a chance to become decent.

So if you're thinking of releasing your cheezy web picture album perl script - DON'T! Even if it has some spiffy feature that none have, please swallow your pride and add that feature to someone else's package. We'll all be better off in the long run.

Think I'm kidding? Try a freshmeat search for "album": http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=album
</rant>

Without further ado, my experience with these packages:

pharch - version 1.3.8 as of 2001-06-13 http://www.breu.org/pharch/

cgi script, 770 lines of perl.

Strange and rigid file layout, html is munged in with the perl (hard to change style), generates bogus html.

Don't bother.

BBPic - http://www.bb-zone.com/zope/bbzone/bbpic_html/

GTK program to build a static photo archive. Not bad, actually, but the author has done the right thing and discontinued the project. Thanks BB!

cthumb - version 3.3.1 as of 2001-06-13 http://puchol.com/cpg/software/cthumb/

Gotta check this one out - it looks feature-rich.

My Photo Gallery - version 1.9 as of 2001-06-11 http://www.fuzzymonkey.org/perl/

Results look good, dynamic approach.

IDS - version 0.71 as of 2001-06-14 http://ids.sourceforge.net/

perl cgi, generates pages on the fly.

BBGallery - version 1.01 as of 2001-06-17 http://www.bb-zone.com/zope/bbzone/projects/bbgallery

perl, generates static web pages, written by the same guy that did BBPic.

AutoTGA - version 0.1.0 as of 2001-06-19 http://www.phatinum.org/AutoTGA/

Yet another! Obviously there aren't enough already in existence, and thanks to sourceforge and freshmeat every nitwit who can write 200 lines of perl can now have their own project. This one features either command-line or CGI operation.

Martin's Photo Frame - version 2.1 as of 2001-06-24

Dynamic PHP. Funny quote: "aims to make it as easy as possible to throw up a bunch of commented photos with thumbnails on the web."

---

A note about security: these packages tend to fall into two categories: those that generate a bunch of static pages and those that generate pages on the fly. Clearly the latter has more functional potential, as it can provide picture upload, dynamic comments, etc. What shouldn't be overlooked, however, are the security implications of the dynamic approach. If you generate a bunch of static pages and put them in a viewable path then you haven't added any additional security risk to your server beyond your web server software. Every CGI, however, is a new program which gets run each time someone looks at a page. I don't know about you, but I feel fairly confident that most of the obvious (and non-obvious) security holes in Apache have been found and fixed. OTOH, I really can't say the same thing about "Ed's picture album CGI program."

In summary, why expose yourself to more risk than you need to? Use the static approach.

-- TobyCabot - 14 Jun 2001