A tribute to the Gallery project June 30, 2014

We just learned about the sad news that the Gallery project is going into hibernation after over 14 years. The Gallery project was one or possibly the first great solution for self hosted gallery websites in 2000. It defined the category of "web image galleries" and was there for years already when Zenphoto was started. Back in 2005 Zenphoto founder Tristan Harward noted on his development announcement:

I have a vision of what the final product will be like I imagine it with the simplicty and flexibility of PhotoStack, the user interface innovations of flickr, the power of Gallery, and the interactivity of WordPress all rolled into one great app that should be a joy to use.

Although Zenphoto started as an alternative to existing systems like Gallery therefore, we never felt being actual "competitors". Just like with our friendly connection with the fine folks from Piwigo. Since Gallery and Zenphoto still share the same Exif libary (we basically took over and incorporated it), we even got a contribution from Gallery's main developer Bharat Mediratta some years ago. That's the open source spirit we embrace.

These are not easy times for self hosted systems with lots of other convenient hosted services all around the web. But we believe that self hosting is still important and has its place on the web. Not only because of that tiny surveillance affair you might have heard of.

It is sad to see such an established system having to stop development. We hope for its community that someone will be found to take over and continue it.