Chris Smith, lead engineer on the Care2.com Photo Sharing project, writes "On Tuesday 11/8 Care2 Photo Sharing reached an exciting milestone: one million photos! The most popular photo subject with our members is cats, so it's no surprise the millionth photo was of a cat, a cute one at that.

Care2 launched it's revamped photo sharing site in January 2005, developed with G2 as it's core. Over the last year more than 400,000 photos have been added, by 77,000 Care2 members. It continues to grow and currently about 2,000 photos are added every day.

G2 has scaled well for us over the course of the year. So far it's been a great success story. The solid foundation of G2 and the flexible architecture allowed us to customize the look and feel, as well as add features to better integrate it into Care2 Connect, our social network. We have extended it to support our master/slave database architecture as well as our new tagging infrastructure. It has recently become an integral part of our new community publishing tool Care2 Share."

This summer, Gallery participated in a program to essentially give students a paid internship with Open Source groups. Funded by Google, the (first) Summer of Code has completed successfully for not only Gallery, but each of the approximately 40 other groups. For two weeks students from around the world sent in proposals from our suggested projects, and ideas of their own. Gallery received nearly 300 applications, and each of our developers closely reviewed each in a week long triage process. We considered many factors, including the timeframe, necessity, usability, and feasibility, which eventually led us to our top selections. In choosing our candidates, we had very high expectations for the work to be completed, as these were top feature requests submitted by our users. The work done by these individuals would be directly related to the perceived quality of our product.

As part of our effort to improve usability and accessibility of information on our website we've introduced several changes over the past few days. We started with some fixes to the search function so now it should be easier to find relevant topics in the forums. Next we launched a new design for the main forums and documentation pages, including banner colors to represent various areas of the Gallery project. We plan to expand this color scheme to other pages within the documentation and forums. Finally, today we performed a significant reorganization of the forums to greatly expand the areas for discussing Gallery 2.x. We hope these changes will help you find the information you need!

We frequently receive requests from users who would be willing to pay for us to do custom development on their websites. Unfortunately, it just doesn't make sense for the core development team to work on any one individual's problems at the expense of making Gallery a better product for everybody, and it pains us not to be able to help because we really want our users to get the most out of their Gallery.

So in order to better serve our users, we've created the new Market Place » Services forum where you can buy and sell Gallery related services! We hope that this will become a quick and easy place for you to get what you want out of your Gallery, or if you're a developer this may be a place for you to make a little money working on something you enjoy.

Please read the Rules of Conduct before posting so that you know what to expect and how to act in this new forum!

Gallery 2.0.1 is now available for download. This release adds no new features. It fixes a security flaw that could allow remote visitors to view sensitive files on your webserver. All releases of Gallery 2, from Alpha 1 onwards are vulnerable to this issue and we strongly recommend that you upgrade to version 2.0.1 as soon as possible. Please follow our upgrading instructions and download and install the latest release.

Thanks to Michael Dipper for identifying this security issue, bringing it to our attention and giving us time to respond appropriately!

Gallery 1.5.1 is now available for download. This release is primarily a bugfix release but includes several new features that should make this worth the upgrade. (Included in this release are security fixes made for Gallery 1.5-pl1 and Gallery 1.5.1-RC3.) Read more for the details on new features, fixes, and the future of Gallery 1.

Download Gallery 1.5.1 from the Gallery Download Page on SourceForge.