Options for upgrading or extracting Gallery 2

[Andrew L]

I have a Gallery 2 install on a CPanel host, just for family consumption, that mostly works (some captions have gone a bit odd but nothing terrible). I haven't added any pictures for many years, I just don't want to lose the work done for that period of family life.

I need to do something because the host won't want me to run old PHP for much longer I imagine.

Wondering about various options...

I could upgrade to Gallery 3. I looked at this a few months and could do it, just didn't get round to it.

I could run a Linux server at home, but seems overkill and more work than I want.

I could port to Piwigo. I think there is a plug-in though I may have to upgrade to Gallery 3 first?

However, it's likely that I will have to buy a pro subscription to Flickr any for professional reasons, so I am wondering how easy it would be to extract the photos and their captions to load to Flickr? I can write Python so happy to try to write a script, and maybe name the files by their captions and metadata, e.g. my_dog_on_the_beach_20_Aug_2010.jpg, or have a directory of jpegs and text files of associated captions.

Another option is to port into Zenfolio for which I also have a subscription.

However, I think Flickr is probably the best longer term solution.

Any thoughts? Are there any tools, plug-ins, scripts etc. that people have written or used for going into Flickr?

TIA

[Harold Hallikainen]

I migrated three galleries from 2 to 3 and am very satisfied. My notes are
at https://groups.google.com/g/gallery-3-users/c/hEFRMHmaG2M .

Harold

[J.R.]

Andrew,

That's a lot of questions. Maybe try to focus on first things first: Where your existing images are stored in your existing Gallery 2 installation. If it's a standard default installation the original images you uploaded into Gallery 2 can be found on your server in the "gallery" main/root folder in a sub-folder named " gallery/g2data/ " probably one more level down in a sub-folder called "gallery/g2data/Albums/ " and various sub-album folders below that. They are not in any special format, they are just your original images, sitting there in the same format they were when you originally uploaded them into Gallery 2. They can be copied out of those locations into other locations on your server(or downloaded to your own local computer, which is the thing to do before anything else).

Next, what to do with the Gallery 2 installation you are currently using just for family consumption. If you have not done so, get the current version of Gallery 3.1.5 from  https://galleryrevival.com/    There is a migration module in there to import G2 into G3 but it's a fairly long and complicated process, although with your apparent skills you could handle it. However, as far as I know this migration will only bring over the images with their file names, but not the captions and comments and other text data -- but I seem to recall someone did the G2 migration and wrote a script to bring over all that other stuff and so you might be able to pull that off as well. Searching this group's messages with keywords like "migration gallery 2" "gallery 2" and will turn up quite a few results -- including a discussion with you back in December of 2020 on this subject --  but here's a good place to start:

https://groups.google.com/g/gallery-3-users/c/_IgOWSBJ1U0/m/9cY3oJ0SAQAJ

So for the family gallery that's probably the way to go. Once you're running it on the latest version of Gallery 3.1.5 you should be good to work on most servers for the next 5 to 8 years, maybe more if the Gallery 3 code can continue to be fixed for whatever comes next and it costs you nothing more other than what you're already paying for a server now.

Finally, the professional purposes gallery. If you have not yet created it, the answer as far as Gallery 3 goes is simple: Just download the latest version of Gallery 3.1.5, install it in a separate location from where you family gallery is installed, and build the new gallery up from there. Give it a try and see if it works for what you want for professional purpose. Yes, there are a bunch of photo gallery websites you can use, but most of them cost money to move beyond the basics and your images get put under their control on their servers, not under your total control like they are with Gallery. On the other hand, many of them have very professional-looking templates built-in, including some that let you easily create "fully responsive" web pages. If you need that sort of thing you should definitely look beyond Gallery 3. The core gallery code was written in the days before there even was such a thing as "fully responsive". It was written with the concept that people would be looking at a Gallery site on a full-sized, fixed-width screen on a desktop or laptop computer. A few people have come up with responsive template experiments for Gallery 3.1.5, I'm not sure how easy they are to use.

Several years ago I tried all the photo gallery website you mention and several others that may or may not even exist at this point. Honestly, I did not like any of them anywhere near as much as Gallery 3... but they have probably changed quite a bit since then and may be just the thing you're looking for. Almost all of them let you get started for free, so the best thing is to just try them out and see what their capabilities are.

Unfortunately,  the last time I looked there was no longer a way to import a Gallery installation into Piwigo -- or any of them. So you would probably have to start from scratch... but if you have not yet created your professional site,  that's what you would have to do in any case even if you stuck with Gallery 3.1.5

I'm afraid I don't know of anything out there which will migrate a Gallery 3 installation into one of these other photo gallery systems, much less an old Gallery 2 installation.

-- J.R.

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