My Gallery is back

After a lot of  bloody hard work, the Gallery is back up and running. It should have been a simple matter; I had the gallery beautifully organized and the MYSQL tables backed up. Or so I thought. My previous ISP wasn’t elegant in the way they handled a rogue worm/virus and I found my Gallery folders and tables largely affected. I’ll spare the blood and guts details, just know there was much data loss and corruption.

And my backup was pretty old.

And the versioning was a little behind. There were customizations. My restores kind of half worked but it was annoying the heck out of me. I promise to get into a better backing up habit. I won’t rely on the ISP advertising of 99.9% uptime with nightly backups ever again. Essentially, I promise not to be lazy again. Lazy with my website.

First thing I did was switch providers. I don’t need that crap again. Second thing was restoring as much as I could; my blog, work and years of random web development history. The blog and all else is good to go. The gallery is in the process of being good to go, I just couldn’t resist the urge to write this. It’s somewhat therapeutic for me, the announcement makes me feel better about how close I am to status quo again.

The actual directory where Gallery was storing all my images was never affected. Gallery maintains a fantastic directory structure, especially when I organzie by year and month as I do. So I was able to download all those files and re-upload using a great plugin that I’ll talk about in a moment.

I’ll plug Gallery 2.2.1 real quick, I am *very* pleased with it. Very very pleased. They’ve added some real nifty plugin tools that are a joy to work with. Gallery Management is just much easier. I’ve written my own PHP photo galleries in the past but I don’t have the time or team behind me to stay the course. That’s where Gallery has been a godsend.

One of my favourite plugins I am now using is PublishXP. Downloads a little registry file that allows me to use the built in “Publish the selected items to the web” link found in Windows Explorer. I like being able to Control/Shift Click the items I want in my gallery and sending it up right from My Pictures. Pretty nifty.

So head on over to my Gallery or click my cool Gallery tab at the top. I really work hard at maintaining an organized gallery for myself, my family and my friends. I’ve now a good 9 years worth of history in there.