Today, while procrastinating on my grad school homework, I installed the Coppermine Photo Gallery app on this site. Previously, I’ve used Gallery, and it is interesting to see some of the differences.

First, Coppermine does not have built-in mod_rewrite support yet (see previous rant), so your pictures have ugly URLs like:
http://www.radicalcongruency.com/cm/displayimage.php?album=random&cat=0&pos=-3
Instead of
http://www.radicalcongruency.com/cm/banners/contxtbanner

Gallery does support mod_rewrite, to beautiful effect. Some Coppermine hackers have tried various things, but they involve editing like 10 files and creating your own mod_rewrite rules, which I’m not in the mood for trying.

Second, Coppermine has really cool templates, much better than the ones that ship with Gallery, IMHO. I believe it is also designed to be easier to integrate with PHP content management systems like PHPNuke.

Third, Coppermine can use the image utilities ImageMagick or GD, whereas Gallery uses ImageMagick or NetPBM. Since only GD appears to work on my server at the moment, for technical reasons that are beyond me (ImageMagick is installed and compiled but not working :-(), I went with Coppermine for today.

Fourth, I was pleased to see that both Gallery and Coppermine have WinXp publishing agents. This is a really cool feature - just select some pictures in Explorer, and click “Publish these files to the web”, and a wizard pops up to upload them to your website - it even resizes them to your choice of three resolutions, even if you’re starting with huge 4MP pics from your digital camera. Amy and I have done hundreds at a time, and it works really well.

The verdict: Remains to be seen. Maybe the next version of Coppermine will have mod_rewrite. Until then, Gallery has it due to the clean URLs.