Gallery is going into hibernation

Need Gallery help? Try the new community support forum: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/gallery3/info

The Gallery team has decided to take a step back from actively maintaining this project. Truth be told, most of the core team got busy with their lives over the past few years and we haven't had the time to really actively maintain the project in a long time. The forums have continued to be lively and helpful and there is still plenty of good conversation there - but no new code has been written in the past 6 months and that's not likely to change.

So after over 14 years, 3 major revisions of the project, many tens of releases, hundreds of contributors, tens of thousands of lines of code, almost a hundred thousand forum topics and almost four hundred thousand comments, it's time for us to shutter up shop.

Why not just leave the site up and operational? Unfortunately - it takes time to actively maintain and police our site. The Gallery website is constantly under attack by spammers and our servers require maintenance. We've been doing that for years, but it's time to call it quits.

So what's next? Sometime soon we'll make the website read only. All the forum posts and topics will still be there, but we'll stop letting people log in and add new content. This will greatly prevent the spread of spam through the site while still allowing search engines to find useful content. Then we'll put the whole site into a very low-overhead maintenance mode until we run out of money to keep it up. Then we'll shut the site down.

While the site is hibernating, some systems will continue to work. You'll be able to download translations for Gallery 3, for example. But at some point we'll stop accepting translation uploads. And when we run out of money, translations will go away. Sorry about that.

It's been a great ride. I'm glad that you could join us with it. But now it's time to move on.

regards,
Bharat

PS: If you're interested in taking over the project - email me and we can talk. You need to be serious about it though because I'm not handing this over to somebody who just wants to use it for SEO purposes. My email address is easy to find. Also, I won't be reading private messages.

Very sorry to hear this! I've been using Gallery since v1.4 and can't imagine using anything else to organize my photo sites. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the project over the years!

Bad news. ;-(
And what about the security updates? Whether RSS will work?

scaturan's picture

I hope security updates will still be released if needed. I really hope someone competent (*cough* supersidr & Dayo) would pickup and reboot the project, then again they would need funding. Kickstarter perhaps? :)

Gallery 2 all the way!

rWatcher's picture

I'm sorry to hear this, but I completely understand. I haven't had much time this past year for my gallery 3 modules either.

dmolavi's picture
scaturan wrote:
I hope security updates will still be released if needed. I really hope someone competent (*cough* supersidr & Dayo) would pickup and reboot the project, then again they would need funding. Kickstarter perhaps? :)

Gallery 2 all the way!

Unfortunately, it takes more than just money to keep a project like this going. There is a really big time commitment as well. I've been working on the project for 13 years, and can tell you that life just starts tossing too many balls into the air, and it's impossible to juggle them all. I think what Gallery needs more than money (it needs that too, for colo costs, etc), is an infusion of fresh, young blood; folks who are familiar not only with the application itself, but all the behind the scenes stuff, coding standards, etc that go along with it. And, most importantly, folks that are able and willing to make the not insignificant time commitment to keep the project rolling.

This project was a great one, introduced me to great people that I've had the pleasure of meeting in person, and taught me to dust off the old programming side of my brain, too.

--
For Gallery 3 modules and themes, visit GalleryModules.com.
For PHPNuke, phpBB2, and phpBB3 integration help, visit NukedGallery.net.

Well, Bummer. I'll keep using it though (unless something down the road just causes it to implode or something). Thanks to all the developers that have put in all the work towards this and the decision is understandable.

- Mark H.

Using Gallery 3.0.9 - gallery.markheadrick.com

:(

I saw "hibernation" and thought, "Not so bad"--then I kept reading...

Many thanks to everyone that made Gallery possible; hate to see it end.

MarkRH wrote:
I'll keep using it though (unless something down the road just causes it to implode or something).

Most likely scenario would probably be a future php compatibility issue or some random (but major) security issue that pops up.

Sorry to hear that too Bharat and team.

Thanks for all your hard work (and personally your support for the G2 screensaver I put together).

Cheers,

Conor
Christchurch, NZ

GLoSS: Gallery2 Local Screen Saver & Desktop Changer

Typical. I find an established gallery system that seems to meet my needs and then I read it is going into "hibernation" which is very misleading as it isn't expected to be waking up!
What about all the Gallery users? My main concern is not greater functionality but security.
As vulnerabilities can be discovered at any time , will they be left with insecure code?
Is the forum going to be closed down as "read only" as well.
Will there be any support for the many Gallery users with possibly thousands of images who will have Gallery installed on their sites?

dmolavi's picture
Patr100 wrote:
Typical. I find an established gallery system that seems to meet my needs and then I read it is going into "hibernation" which is very misleading as it isn't expected to be waking up!
What about all the Gallery users? My main concern is not greater functionality but security.
As vulnerabilities can be discovered at any time , will they be left with insecure code?
Is the forum going to be closed down as "read only" as well.
Will there be any support for the many Gallery users with possibly thousands of images who will have Gallery installed on their sites?

If you are willing and able to take up the project, by all means, contact Bharat. None of us were paid for our efforts, it was done on our free time, which for most of us, has disappeared (families, kids, etc).

I understand your concern over security. I don't think that there is any good answer to that which would satisfy all involved, but I don't want to put words in other developers mouths.

Enjoy Gallery for what it is: A great, roll-your-own photo gallery, with loads of modules and plug-ins, that is extremely customizable, developed and maintained by donated time from a group of developers who wanted something just a little bit better than what was available.

--
For Gallery 3 modules and themes, visit GalleryModules.com.
For PHPNuke, phpBB2, and phpBB3 integration help, visit NukedGallery.net.

I thought that G3.1 was right around the corner. I'm guessing that I was wrong?

How close or far away is/was 3.1 to release?

It'd be a pity to see that work stay hidden--especially since (I believe) it was to make use of updated libraries, etc.

Since he said there has been no new code written in 6 months I doubt 3.1 was close to release. If it were close than I think they would of found a way to get it done. 3.1 was also suppose to have CMS integration at one point as well.

Well good luck on all your future endeavors dev team. Thanks for the well written software that I have used for a long time. I am about ready to transfer away from G2 to a native Drupal solution since there was no upgrade path for me. It was good while it lasted.

GeekDrop's picture

How about open sourcing it? Put it all up on GitHub or similar.


GeekDrop.com | GeekDrop Facebook Fan Page | GeekDrop Twitter

It already is on github. G3 is anyways.
https://github.com/gallery/gallery3
GPL v2 license.

dmolavi's picture
GeekDrop wrote:
How about open sourcing it? Put it all up on GitHub or similar.[

Gallery (all versions) have always been open source. G3 is on Git. G1 and G2 are hosted on Sourceforge's SVN.

--
For Gallery 3 modules and themes, visit GalleryModules.com.
For PHPNuke, phpBB2, and phpBB3 integration help, visit NukedGallery.net.

mikeage's picture

Thanks Bharat and Team for everything you did on G1, G2, and G3! I've been using gallery since 2003, and have had nothing but good experience with the code, the forums, and the development teams. You all did a great job, and I salute you.

Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!
I have long been looking for a photo gallery, which may be exactly what Galllery3 can. I have been taking all what else is so, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Typo3, nothing similar found. Gallery3 is uniquely good for photo galleries. It's the best!
Why did this idea to close it and do not offer? Perhaps you would find new ones. It is known to few believe how strong Gallery3 on the market. In Gallery3 puts a lot of power. Not everything is timely perfect as for smartphones, but otherwise it's very good. I would say it is unbeatable in the field CMS for photo galleries.

I have seen many Gallery3 and almost no one has the potential fully exploited.

Unfortunately, I've encountered only in autumn 2013 Gallery3. Previously I had a pure HTML gallery with over 3000 photos, for over 5 years. This HTML gallery I had now set within half a year on Gallery3. Now she has over 7000 photos. I have very detailed description of the photos and albums. I have adapted very much in the Gallery3 manually, using the very good forum here. I have invested a lot of time in my Gallery3. And now the end? Fuuuuu ....
Please do not!

Oh no! Always been a big fan of Gallery. Thanks for the project and the effort over the years. I totally understand the time constraints and need to move on. Hopefully the project will be picked up by another competent team of coders with more time right now. There's nothing currently out there that provides the slick niche that Gallery 3 does... at least for me. I'd be really sorry to see it not wake up from hibernation. Someone poke the bear!

sremick's picture

This is horrible, horrible news. :(

I've been using Gallery for many, many years and now have multiple sites going. I don't know of another alternative. Gallery was the solution people used on their websites... tried, tested, used all over.

Desperately hoping someone takes up the torch. I don't know what to do now otherwise. :(

Echo, echo, echo.

slart wrote:
In Gallery3 puts a lot of power.... I have seen many Gallery3 and almost no one has the potential fully exploited.

moorezilla wrote:
There's nothing currently out there that provides the slick niche that Gallery 3 does.

sremick wrote:
I don't know of another alternative. Gallery was the solution people used on their websites... tried, tested, used all over.

Serge D's picture

Unfortunate but understandable.
I was not putting much work myself lately into my code here so I can relate

I would like to thank everyone involved in the project and wish them the best.
Life goes on and without fresh blood in any project, things would die out

I will be trying Zenphoto and Piwigo to see if I should migrate my content and theme to one or another.

PS: I do understand the feeling but we need to realize that G3 has been stagnant (effectively in hibernation mode) for some time already - we are on an old Kohana core and not much of modern stuff was introduced in recent years etc.

While G3 is great and I have put a lot of time into it myself, a rewrite of the G3 core may not be doable at all.

If someone decides to pick it up and run with it, there would need to be some serious thinking put in up front or else, it would be just merely be another round of maintenance work and nothing new.

Serge

EDIT: My thoughts on alternatives will be posted on my blog
_____________________________________________
Photo Gallery | GreyDragon Theme | Follow on Twitter

suprsidr's picture

I do have an available server to host a solution on. Although I've never delved into Drupal - I'm sure I could host a read only version to keep the old forums live, and maybe setup a new forum solution for new community interaction.
We could host all files & bug reporting on GIT and volunteers can handle fixing issues.

I'm still a G2 fanboy, and have minimal experience w/ G3, but if we can get a few dedicated enthusiasts I think this route would work.

-s
________________________________
All New jQuery Minislideshow for G2/G3

Man, I just suggested people sign up on Gallery based photo hosting websites and also pointed them here only to find out this might be the end of the greatest (no offense to the others!) of it's kind! I'm really hoping that some people come and pick it up. I can't imagine that this won't be continued or forked. Hopefully at least someone comes in and picks up any bug, security and compatibility maintenance for a long while. :/

This is one of those times I wish I could just throw money(pref. BTC) at something and that would make everything better. Haha. Especially considering I just began donating to my G2 based photo hosting site a few months ago.

By the way linked to this page from https://vampirefreaks.com/group_comment.php?entry=6185740?r=XdarkXanarchyX

Skin's picture

I' am very sorry to hear this, I've been a member for about 11 years.... it is time to convert my galleries )-:

Thanks for your hard work.

cchiappa's picture

As a G1 -> G2 -> G3 user, this is disappointing but not a surprise - anyone who has peeked at the github repositories I'm sure could see the writing on the wall (and I had in fact anti-recommended G3 to a couple of people for this reason).

I'm sure everyone would be interested to hear tales, succesful or otherwise, of attempts to migrate to other software (piwigo, zenphoto, coppermine are some of the competitors that come to mind. In particular, any tools people develop to move comments, tags, etc. would probably be appreciated. Hopefully the forums and websites can limp along for a few more months at least.

scaturan's picture

it looks like Chris (@ckdake) is migrating his Gallery site to Flickr - he mentioned a custom export script - https://gist.github.com/ckdake/612bdaa1a8333ac37b17

Indeed, times have changed. the creator of PHP - Rasmus Lerdorf used Gallery. The founder developer of WordPress - Matt Mullenweg also used Gallery - both have since moved on.

I wonder if any core developers will continue using Gallery - or will be left to the community to keep alive.

Gallery 2.x still works with PHP 5.4.x - I guess I'll migrate all of my hosted multisites to something else once the hibernation kicks in, and nobody picks up the project.

scaturan's picture

@Anarchy-X - will for sure let you know way ahead of time if I decide to shutdown Pixi.me for good! :)

Okat's picture

I too am very sorry to hear this. Thank you all for your hard work and a very solid product.
Family matters do come first, or education and I wish you all the best of luck.
May you all get what you deserve.

Best regards,

Okat

leiferikson's picture

ouups, that´s bad news. Thank to u all for this and I hope that there will be another team to go on!

best wishes from bilderbar.de

----

Bharat + everyone who workt on the gallery project: Thanks for everything! i'll still be using gallery 3 for personal use, it's great!
A special thanks go's to Dave! For helping me out with great solutions!!!

Best regards,

Goos

jnash's picture

I'm sorry to hear this as well. Been here since the beginning. I'm hopeful someone will pick up the ball. I'll be ready to help in any way possible as well.

32 "dislike"s only? Does that mean there are so few users only? Are people prefering picasa, flickr or other fotocommunities?

No good news. Of course, Gallery will not stop working immediatly, but it would really a pittyif nobody is picking up the project.

http://reisetraeume.com

Well, you should be more accurate and simply state that you are terminating the gallery project and leaving downloads available until they become incompatible with future generation OSes and components, at which point users will have to find an alternate image hosting package.

I am sad to see this project terminated, it is truly the best I have ever used and I cannot imagine using anything else. If I were a programmer I would gladly contribute to this project just to keep it alive but sadly I am an infrastructure/vmware type and not a programmer :-( Best of luck to you and thank you for devoting 13 years of your time to have created and run this project in the first place!

Of course people can use picasa, flickr and so on but there is a consideration to keep in mind - much like facebook, when you put your personal images on picasa or flickr they are no longer private, someone else has posession of them now. In days gone by you kept your photo albums on a shelf, it was yours and private - that is a benefit of gallery, install it on a server, place your images there, lock out browsing from strangers and once again it can keep your things private. There are pros and cons to gallery vs picasa/flickr etc.

Serge D's picture

There you go - http://blog.dragonsoft.us/2014/07/08/gallery-3-project-migration/ - my first post on migrating from G3 to ...

Serge
_____________________________________________
Photo Gallery | GreyDragon Theme | Follow on Twitter

beckett's picture

It's been a fun ride! I owe immeasurable gratitude to everyone on the G1 team for making me into a real software developer. I'd drifted away lately from maintaining my own Gallery as other social networks improved their photo support. It's the twilight of a glorious era.

-Beckett

You can all blame me for this...

Whenever I find a product in a store and incorporate it into my life, loving it, wondering how I ever got along without it - it gets discontinued. This ALWAYS happens...

There have been hints for many months, heck, maybe even longer to some degree that this eventuality would come to pass. I just hoped I'd be wrong. Kinda' wished I'd have kept those static HTML pages I used to work so hard at but abandoned for the ease and magic of Gallery.

As others have said, thanks for the efforts over the years. But all good things must end.

Serge D's picture

We will Gork... now we know... :)

If you into TJ :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdB7GDZY3Pk

Serge
_____________________________________________
Photo Gallery | GreyDragon Theme | Follow on Twitter

As everyone above said, it's sad, but understandable. Thank you for all this years of support and hard work.
Best wishes for all of the gallery team and enjoy your real life. Family is what really matters!
Thank you so much.
ASB

C'mon we have a large enough group of supporters to get the funding ball rolling.
Lets pull it together, donate a little $ and possibly a Kickstarter or other crowd funded campaign.

Anyone in?

floridave's picture

@bwagner; I don't think you understand. Money is not the issue here. Qualified developers that are willing to work on the project is what is lacking. Money has never been a motivator to any of the previous contributors, including myself.

Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

Is there a way to add a comment to one of the photos? I found myself and my husband and we are listed as ????
http://keithandnancyrose.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=987
The people in the picture are Mike and Tina Nagle

suprsidr's picture
Bettina Mike wrote:
Is there a way to add a comment to one of the photos? I found myself and my husband and we are listed as ????
http://keithandnancyrose.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=987
The people in the picture are Mike and Tina Nagle

you would need to contact the owners of keithandnancyrose.com
Although their site is running gallery software, we have no control over their site.

-s

Thanks! Its been great using for the last 8 years. Sad but these things are to be expected with free software. I hope it can be handed over to people to continue.

Andy

Oh what a terrible news :-( Gallery is one of my favourite Project and i use it on many sites....
And also you Developers are very friendly, also on forums....
I am very sad...

I hope you will develope security and compatibility fixes in the feature

I want to thank the whole team for this very very good gallery. My current account is allready more than 11,5 years old, and using gallery even longer..... While my systems from my web server where changing, gallery was always a hard condition that it would run on it. Currently it is running on a Synology. I understand the reason but......... As long if there is no good reason I will not leaving G3 and hoping someone will start it up again and go on with the good work........

PS the many hours which was spend in Gallery has reduced the time for ALL user for using it...... thnx thnx thnx thnx

oops! sorry to here this :(. Gallery is one of the open source site where i used to manage my digital photos for my website. I don't now other alternatives also :(.
I thank the whole team to getting up this project for free and developing the script in user friendly method :).

mrcolj's picture

Thank you for the last 11 years in which I was a Gallery user. Before y'all disappear, will someone recommend where we should all go? Maybe someone make a big matrix of all the different photo programs--from your expert perspective? Like this wikipedia page, but with the authority I project onto you guys?!

--Colin Jensen

mrcolj's picture

Yup 11 if not 12 years, because that avatar headshot is from 2002.
--Colin Jensen