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A small update after a long time: After my web host SDF.org changed the HTTP server from good old Apache to Nginx last year, the Gallery has been broken, mostly due to lack of support for user-specified Apache .htaccess and mod_rewrite rules in Nginx. Fortunately I’ve now gotten it sorted out with a little assistance from the SDF admins and the very helpful people at the Gallery3 mailing group. Some server configuration for PHP had to be changed, and it was actually just a pretty small fix.
The Gallery Project has been around since 2001, when I first installed it. Unfortunately the project’s been in hibernation since 2014, but lately there’s been an attempt to make it work on newer PHP versions and fix some bugs, called Gallery Revival, and the code is available on GitHub.
To be honest, I’ve not really used the Gallery for a long time – but keeping it functional is important to me (at the very least for nostalgic reasons) as I’ve had it running such a long time. I really like the features and looks compared to other photo albums. It’s fast, relatively simple to configure and uses a flexible modules-based framework. In addition I believe it’s important to have an alternative to using the big privacy-invasive companies like Microsoft and Google and host photos on my own site.
Even if Gallery now is back to working, I still think it was a big mistake for SDF to move to Nginx as a web server. In my opinion Nginx is not well suited to a shared user environment where users need some degree of control of how files are served, especially for PHP. SDF could still use Nginx as a caching proxy for performance reasons, and still use Apache for user files.