As announced last month, the Gallery team has been hacking away on all things Gallery 3 in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the last 2 days. Here's a few things you might be interested in:

• Photos! - These are just mine and I'll be updating them as the weekend continues, and we'll have a full list of photos once we're all back at home.
• User Survey Results - Julia, our OpenUsability student for 2009, stopped by to present the results of the user survey that she conducted over the past month which is full of very interesting information.
• Gallery Trac Timeline - We've found a lot of new bugs and fixed a lot of bugs (including major things with "organize" and contextual menus), and created a bug category for documentation issues. The timeline shows most of the details.
• Our "team dinner" isn't until tonight, but we've already managed to drink a lot of beer (including local beer made with chili peppers) and eaten a lot of great food.
• It's been great having a few people that aren't on the core team stop by! Hopefully a few more people will be able to stop by next year.

While we've gotten a lot done, there is still over a full day of coding to go and we're planning on releasing the final beta of Gallery 3 really soon!

We had hundreds of responses from users in 49 countries. Did you know...

• Most users use Gallery for personal purposes (85%), 10% use Gallery for professional reasons, and 5% are developers or supporters.
• Gallery accounts come in all sizes. Users share anywhere from 3 to 350,000 photos and manage anywhere from 1 to 25,000 user accounts.
• The vast majority of Gallery users (86%) have an IT education or work in a field that requires IT skills.
• The five most important qualities in photo management software for our users are: easy to upload photos; good user interface; easy administration; speed of tasks; and easy to set photo permissions.

Check out the Full Season Of Usability 2009 Survey Results.

Gallery's 2009 Season of Usability (SoU) user survey is up and running- and we want you to participate!

Calling all Gallery module and theme developers!

This year the Gallery Project is holding its annual conference August 27th-30th in Santa Fe, NM. Since it began 4 years ago, GalleryCon has been a closed event but this year we'd like to invite module and theme developers to attend.

Beta 2 is ready and that brings us one giant step closer to a polished Gallery 3.0 launch! We're very happy to announce that beta 2 comes with a 1-click upgrader. That's right-- you no longer have to reinstall your Gallery 3 install, we support upgrading from beta 1 (but not from earlier releases). What's that? You can't wait to try it out? Download it now! or read on for more details...

Gallery 3 is finally in beta! We've been hard at work over the past 8 months designing and building a worthy successor to the Gallery line and we are happy to say that we've got something that we think will make you very happy. The big news for this release is that from this point on, we will support upgrades to future releases! But don't take our word for it, download it now!