I’m not very impressed with the performance of Gallery2, it’s MUCH MUCH slower than G1. I understand it has database backend, the codebase is huge in comparison, yada yada yada… Still, vB is pretty big and it runs quite fast on my server.

I also tried viewing my G2 gallery in Firefox instead of Safari on my PowerBook, and guess what, Firefox is MUCH faster! I know, Safari is not the fastest browser anymore, but still, there must be something about how G2 does CSS or the dynamic shit that makes it super slow in Safari (and probably Konqueror too).

I don’t recommend upgrading your gallery to G2, or using G2, unless you have more than 4k pictures. My snapshot gallery had around 3k pictures and it worked just fine. I guess I could downgrade, my G1 installation is intact, I’ll have to think about this more…

I messed up the album database of my snapshot gallery, had to restore from a known-good backup and apply the difference since the backup was made, not a problem. I then decided to upgrade to G2, the upgrade went smoothly, was able to import my Gallery 1 albums without any problem. There was a minor annoyance though; there should a default layout for the top-level gallery, and one for the albums. I wanted the classic theme for the top-level page coz it shows one album per row with the sub-album tree on the right. But for each album, I wanted to use the matrix theme so I get 3 items per row. To accomplish this, I had to set the default to classic, and went into each individual album to change its theme to matrix. Took a while with the number of albums I have.

Also, in the Edit Album page, there should be an option to apply the changes recursively to each sub-album in the tree, this was there in G1, no reason why they can’t do it in G2. It would’ve saved a lot of my time if I was able to set stuff recursively. 🙂