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I have been reluctant to put photo galleries into my client's sites because there hasn't been any that have really worked all that well and I've tried most of them. I tried RS Gallery a long time ago and had given up on it too...

But I decided to give it another try and wow, I'm impressed! Very professional and feature rich. It's not too complicated (I'm looking at you Gallery2) and it integrates seamlessly into Joomla and becomes part of your site. I did have to use a nightly build version to rid this release of some of the bugs but it works great!

Hats off to the developers and I'm sure with the skills you've demonstrated so far, RS Gallery is only going to get better and better in the future!

One MAJOR flaw of this component is it doesn't have constantly updated sef extensions. Since, the developers are the only persons who really know the structure of their component/database, they are surely responsible for updating those extensions.

On your forums, I've read nothing but blaming other people, like developers of all those SEF components, for not updating their extension list with one for RSGallery.. This could really be a big problem for this component.

Also, the developers of this component are also responsible for keeping their content elements files (for JoomFish), the same reason as above..

Oh yes, I almost forgotten another very important thing. While I was trying to somehow develop the SEF extension for myself (since no extensions found on the internet were good enough for me) I've realized you are using $catid and $limitstart variables (altogether with page=inline) to display a singe image. Is this really necessairy? For example, you could use only $id (like for download link) and from that $id you can do a single SELECT statement and retrieve those $limitstart and $catid from the #__rsgallery2_files table..

And what is gained using id in URL instead of catid, limitstart, and page? Well, if you think about it a bit, you'll see that your links for displaying a certain image, remain the same no matter if user changes ordering of image in a gallery, or if the user moves the image in another gallery. That way you will be able to get the sef extensions written by other people in your email inbox, to save your time, but this way, there is no way to create good SEF links if your links to a certain image change a lot, depending on the user actions on that image..

First let me say I love this component! It has so many of the features in a gallery that the others are lacking; resizing of the original - a MUST have IMO, multi-upload, bulk-upload from a zip file, and the presentation of the gallaries is perfect! I know all of the lightbox and slideshow stuff looks cool, but on a website where you're trying to present galleries, alot of times it just isn't effective. RSG2 gives clean, simple, effective presentation of top level galleries, then clicks down to similarly presented details within those galleries. Perfect!

I'm not thrilled that the pics are all stored in one massive directory. As other b4 has said, if a user drops, removing their pics is an admin nightmare. Next I've encountered problems uploading pics. It's not that I've reached any maximum number of allowable pics or anything, and I can see the pic in the "monster" pic directory, it just wont show in the gallery or anywhere in the component. Of course the component is in alpha so some of these things may yet be worked out.

All-in-all its worth a closer look.

I had about 100 hi-res photos to upload, and the upload feature simply wouldn't work with them. It was either maxed by the PHP limit on uploads, or they had to be manually uploaded. So, for anything that approaches more than a few lower resolution pictures, you may need to look elsewhere.

I am relatively new to Joomla, having taken over a site that somebody else created. I'd been using Zoom Media Gallery until a few days ago when the main gallery page developed an error that I couldn't fix. After getting no response from the developers and at their forum, I gave up and looked for something else.

After researching the many gallery components available for Joomla, I decided on RSgallery because it had the features I was looking for and had many positive reviews.

I just installed it this morning and am still working on creating my new galleries, but WOW. This is so much better than Zoom - I am really pleased. The interface is much easier to work with and it just looks so much nicer than Zoom (and I haven't even touched the CSS yet...really only a few tweaks here and there) I love the option of having different templates and I tried them all, but it seems the default tables template will work best for my site anyway.

I highly recommend this component for anyone needing a basic, clean image gallery. As someone noted on another comment, be sure to go to the config panel before you start uploading images. I also changed my thumbnail size to 100 (from the default 80 - too small, I think) and full size to 500 - I'm not sure how changing those numbers after uploading images would work, so do it first.

You get an excellent rating. Thanks!

Component installs and runs good on Joomla 1.13, but has no real file management. It dumps all image uploads in common folders. Should make individual image folders for each user (named with username or userid or something), so when a user un-registers, images may be easily deleted by deleting one single folder. With the current setup you would have lots of image residue after a user deletes their account and does not delete their images manually. You would have no way of knowing which images are actually still valid unless you had individual user image folders to upload to.

I've been looking for an image component for my site. So far this is the best one. Even though it took me a while to figure it out. But after everything was installed, it's been working great!

The steps are: install RSGallery2, install com_joomlalib and then install RS2gallery bridge component.
After that, configure it and add a component menu item to your site. It took me a whole day to find these steps...:-(
Overall, I recommend it!
But I wish there is an easier way to upload pics to the gallery. Or perhaps an option to move the images from other folders.

I have mixed feelings about this component. One one hand, creating galleries and uploading images is easy-to-do, and supplemented by the ability to do batch (zipped multiple image) uploads.

On the other hand, my RSGallery versions never seemed to align well in the general category display, and better inline documentation for the numerous display options would have been helpful.

There's also the question of display. Some of the newer Joomla Extensions allow for a nice automatic display of all images in a folder, in a content item - eliminating the need for file-uploading, labelling, etc.

However, if your goal is to have more interactivity (comments, ratings and other features) RSGallery2 accomplishes this well.

Pretty good component - just make sure you are using the right one.

Absolutely outstanding. I was looking for a gallery component that my 14 year old son could use on his site. It needed to have an easy interface to add collections of pictures and then a simple way of displaying them in an organised format (Prom night, First day at new school, Latest show, etc). This excels in both.

There is a bulk upload facility that none of the others have. When uploading a single pic you can set all the information you like including captions and descriptions.

Displaying your galleries is as easy as putting a menu link to the component - nothing else needed even for adding new galleries which is perfect for a 14 year old. No fiddling about with content pages and mosimages

The control panel for this component is outstanding and as straight forward and easy to understand as the Joomla control panel.

It will even watermark your pictures with a copyright notice of your choice!

For those with big sites with many users you can limit the number of galleries and the number of photos each user can have.

Although I usually avoid Alpha products like the plague I am really glad I haven't done so this time.

An excellent rating doesn't even come close to describing how good this component is.

This component really is very nice and usefull, however I was wonder if it was possible to allow comments on images, only for registered users.

there's not much more that needs to be said. I had no problems uploading, configuring and getting it to look good on my site.

perfect for the smaller to mid-size sites or joomla/website newbies like myself. I spent all day trying to configure the myriad other galleries available. Wished I hadn't.

I really like this gallery. I was looking for something easy to install and manage and that looks good. This is it. I use Gallery2 in other pages, but I just couldn't get the G2 Bridge and other viewers to work well in Joomla. I did RSGallery2 to work fast and easy.

Thanks!
Chris

You could call this easiest gallery, very simple to install and very good support in the forums.

Yes I did have some problems, due a fixed Joomla template, where photographs were displayed all over the browser window. But the support forum came up trumps, and it now works brilliantly. I am very pleased with how the gallery works.

I also had the uploading problems shown in other reviews with earlier versions of RSGallery2.

In the versions I am using, 1.12.2 and 1.13.1, seem very fast, and I have not come across any bugs or other problems yet.

No problems uploading or displaying, very, very happy indeed.

I am just setting up a new site and was going through the usual looking for the right components, etc. After spending most of the day trying out various gallery addons, I decided to try RSgallery2. Wow. Fast and easy to set up. Very nice to look at. The download option is a nice touch too. I'm just sorry that I didn't try this one earlier. The component says alpha, but it works better than most other "stable" packages that I tried. I highly recommend this. Just one quick note, though, be sure to choose the thumbnail size that you want BEFORE you set up your galleries. The default is 80 which I find a little small.

This component has some really nice features.. but if you're considering using it for a high-traffic site, or for very large galleries, you should move on.

Aside from the already-documented issues using the FTP “upload” routine (frequent PHP memory issues when processing large photos) and the fact that the photos are all stored in one bin (you’ll need to name your photos well to have any home of subsequent management), the fatal flaw we’ve discovered, unfortunately in production, is that the program can’t deliver photos properly under high load situations.

When more than one user tries to view photo close-ups in the gallery within the same fraction of a second, the application cannot determine the difference between users, and serves back the same photo to all of them. In practice, what this means is that users click thumbnail A in album X, but are served close-up B in gallery Y – because someone else online had clicked thumbnail B within the same second.

Also, the on-the-fly watermarking routine breaks down under load, and delivers distorted photos. It has to be disabled when traffic is high.

These problems won’t bother you if you have a low-traffic site, but we unfortunately had 500 visitors to a customer’s site within an hour, and that was enough to find out the hard way that this isn’t a long-term solution.

I tried them all, gallery2, coppermine, zoom...etc...etc...etc... But RSgallery2 had everything I needed and is well put together. If your looking for a gallery for joomla stop now because you've found one!

I have been looking for a gallery for quite a while and after I got this installed, I lept for joy. Literally! It works with my custom joomla skin almost perfectly out of the box and it does everything I need. Plus it is super easy to use which will be perfect for my client.

One note, when I first installed, I was getting errors, but a quick trip to the forums told me I needed to upgrade my joomla version (was 1.0.10, needed to be 1.0.11 or higher). I upgraded to 1.0.12 and bam, it worked flawlessly. I am so pumped. THANK YOU!!!

This is just what I was looking for. Auto scaling, easy setup, auto thumbing, option to keep original image, easy folder structure (galleries in recursive structure)... AND NOT LEAST, BATCH UPLOAD!!!

Great job and credz to the programmers.

I needed a simple image gallery for my website and after trying the others RS2 has to be the easiest to use. It was very straight forward and I had a gallery 5mins after it was installed. Top Stuff. Highly recommended!

The main thing wrong with rsgallery2 is that every every single release is bug ridden, most of them trivial and fixable but everytime you ask a question on the forum you get told to upgrade to the latest SVN...

The same bugs then seem to reoccur in later releases or you get another irritating bug. I spent a month or so with no batch upload, then uploaded to the latest version and something equally critical just didn't work... its a huge shame because its so close.... it just never works and new features are added in front of stability.. my experience was I had to patch it and upgrade more than any Joomla component just to get help on the forum and then soon as you do its a new problem.. after loosing your data for the n'th time its just tiring.