I was a little skeptical about this component but I decided to give it a go. I used http://webwait.com/ to provide some basic benchmarking which closer resembles what a typical user would see.

I ran the benchmark without the product installed. Next I enabled eAccelerator and ran the bench again. What a difference! I then ran the bench again using the FIle method versus eAccelerator... Guess what? It was just as fast so, if you don't have eAccelerator in your hosted environment, don't worry, this component will still have a big impact especially for heavily queried sites like CB sites which I benched against.

Another bench I ran was turning on the Joomla cache.. Ran the bench again and even more improvements were seen on sites with big images...

I would say install at your own risk but so far, it's working perfect.

Thank you for sharing this most needed component...

What would make this rock is if it supported MP3's and YouTube video ID numbers. This would put SOBI Gallery over the top compared to others. The ultimate combo would be to pair up SOBI Gallery, AllVideos Plugin (or one of the others) and a reviews component. You would have a major milestone for a media gallery that a lot of people have been wanting!

SOBI is a great product. Used it and gallery recently for a small prototype site.

This is another one of those "should be included" in Joomla products. Thanks guys!

I used this component for the backbone of oneclickmenu.com. The great thing about this component is that all the code is accessible!!! Without that, I couldn't have built my site with it. The downside (every product has one) is that assigning multiple categories is not very intuitive and slow. Other than that, this product fits the bill for a LOT of different models.

Just what we have been looking for. A way to replicate J! installs for new customer installations.

Excellent product. Doesn't work with Safari though. Use FF or IE.

Didn't work for me. I tried to install in a subdir on a live site with the dir permissions set to 777 and nothing. :-(

This is a good component if you don't need to add images. Makes it easy to content.