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I looked at dozens of solutions, and tested a handful. Although other solutions might have fancier animation, this was the first one I found that allowed one to display an entire album/set in an article properly. In that sense, it is a Photo Gallery replacement for solutions like Menalto, RS, Phoca and others like that. Allows you to save the space on your server for things besides hosting photos.

The one confusing thing I found was that the number of thumbnail rows and columns (set in the plugin tag) didn't behave intuitively. However, it wasn't much of a problem; I just had to adjust the numbers until they fit the space I am working in.

Dave Smith

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.