Gallery 3.0 Release Candidate 1 Is Ready!

The first release candidate of Gallery 3.0 (code named Santa Fe) is here! Your feedback in our beta phase has been priceless, help us with our final push to work out the last little bugs and issues and polish up the product! Download it now! or read on for more details...

Update: A bug crept in at the last minute. It's fixed and the download link is updated. Sorry!

About Gallery 3

Gallery 3.0 is almost a finished product but we still have a little bit of polishing to do. And some of our features (like organize and tags) could use a bit more functionality. But even in its incomplete state it is a fast, reliable and secure product. Live a little, try it out! If you're excited about creating beautiful themes and writing your own custom modules, now is a great time to get involved!

This release is code named Santa Fe to commemorate the location of our last team meetup. It was thanks to the generous donations from many of you that we were able to get to the team together and make a big push to move Gallery forward. We had a wonderful time in New Mexico and want to celebrate that milestone of our release.

Obligatory security warning

Our good friends at Gotham Digital Science did a professional security audit for us, and we have fixed all significant flaws they uncovered. As with all web applications, we encourage you to watch for new releases and be prepared to upgrade if we put out security fixes.

Upgrading

Note: You can upgrade from Beta 1, 2 or 3 (but not from earlier releases -- sorry!)

Upgrading is really easy! Unpack the new version, move the var/ directory of the old version to the new version's folder and then either browse to: http://example.com/gallery3/index.php/upgrader (except use your real domain name) or if you have shell access, run: php index.php upgrade

So what's new in this release?

• RC 1 (hide details)
  • Addressed all significant security issues including protection from brute force attacks on account passwords, compartmentalization of the administration area, and more
  • Greatly improved Gallery 2 Import now includes permissions, and forwards urls from your old Gallery 2 install to your spiffy new Gallery 3.
  • Much improved bidirectional language support, and adjusting the UI language to guest user (& browser) preferences.
  • Many stability and cross browser support improvements and bug fixes. 194 closed tickets in the RC 1 release.
  • A new REST API that lets you interact with the application without using the website. This API lets you embed albums or slideshows in other websites, or lets you integrate Gallery 3 into desktop applications.
  • Theming improvements, including a UI to manage blocks in your theme's sidebar
  • User integration improvements, e.g. enabling the user contributed LDAP module which allows you to use Gallery with existing LDAP user accounts.
• Beta 3 (hide details)
  • Configurable custom URLs for each album, photo or movie.
  • Greatly improved UI for administration pages
  • Systematic fixes for Cross Site Security (XSS) vulnerabilities.
  • Compatibility with PHP 5.3
  • New, extensible context menus for albums, photos and movies.
  • Better support for viewing full size images
  • Rewritten Organize module. It's got a little less functionality now, but it's much cleaner and will be a primary focus for the next release.
  • Tags are now searchable
  • Much improved bidirectional language support
  • 103 fixed tickets in the beta 3 release
• Beta 2 (show details)
  • Support for photo printing with Digibug
  • Many stability improvements for the Gallery 2 import module, including better logging, and multi-site support. You still can't import from embedded Gallery 2 installs (sorry!)
  • The Server Add module has been completely rewritten to be more robust.(beta 2)
  • Recent Changes and Most Viewed albums are now available
  • Improved localization support for strings in dialog boxes
  • Lots of small improvements to the organize module (a full rewrite is planned for the next release)
  • Totally awesome 1-click upgrader. Upgrading has never been this easy!
  • Support for configurable date formats (under Admin > Settings > Advanced)
  • Support for short URL styles (look in gallery3/.htaccess for info on how to set that up)
  • 108 closed tickets in the beta 2 release
• Beta 1 (show details)
  • Support for upgrading to further releases
  • Full HTTPS support
  • Use the EXIF caption as the photo description
  • Support for installs into non-empty databases
  • Gallery 2 Import now imports comments, sort orders, keywords, tags, timestamps and more
  • Photo and album names are editable
  • Big improvements to the Organize (bulk editing) feature including drag and drop, mass rotation and album highlights
  • Advanced settings editor
  • Greatly improved permissions interface
  • Improved localization client UI allowing to translate plurals
  • Performance improvements
  • 85 closed tickets in the beta 1 release
• Alpha 4 (show details)
  • Bulk editing interface
  • Gallery 2 to Gallery 3 import
  • Tag management for admins
  • 41 closed tickets in the alpha 4 release
• Alpha 3 (show details)
  • Support for database table prefixes
  • Random image block for the sidebar
  • Module administration view
  • Added translation server and localization client
  • Reimplemented the Flash uploader using SWFUpload
  • Album sort orderers
  • Add photos directly from the web server (improved in alpha 3)
  • User/group/permissions management UI
  • Auto-login at the end of the installer, with a welcome page
  • Moved Google Maps and Polar Rose modules out of the official package into the community repository
  • 58 closed tickets in the alpha 3 release
• Alpha 2 (show details)
  • Localized UI with built-in editor (server side support is not finished)
  • RSS feed for comments
  • RSS feed for new images or movies
  • EXIF read support
  • Add photos directly from the web server
  • Support for uploading and viewing FLV movie files
  • Ability to view full size photos
  • Boolean and full text search
• Alpha 1 (show details)
  • Album browsing
  • Item commenting, comment moderation
  • Spam protection with Akismet and Recaptcha
  • Image toolkit support for ImageMagick, GD, and GraphicsMagick
  • Theme system, including separate admin theme.
  • Module system to extend the functionality, and a series of existing modules
  • Basic metadata boolean search with relevance ranking
  • Flash-powered slideshow (Cooliris)
  • Album media RSS feeds
  • Quick edits of item metadata
  • In place item deletion and rotation
  • User group management (drag & drop interface)
  • Basic user permission management
  • Admin dashboard with drag and drop blocks

The Gallery 3 philosophy

We set out to make an amazing application. Not only will you be able to easily host your photos, but you'll find that Gallery 3 makes it a joy. We focused on the following 4 principles:

• Keep It Small - Gallery 3 is 5.7 MB with all of its features. This is a fraction of the size of most similar applications.

• Make It Intuitive - We've got some great usability and user interface experts on our team, designing and prototyping interfaces that just make sense. Frequent tasks are now quick and easy. Tough tasks are possible with great new interfaces.

• Make It Fast - We've made some tough decisions in keeping the scope of Gallery 3 small. We've created a set of features that we think will make most of you really happy, while avoiding some of the crazier features that make the product slow. As a result, you're going to find that it's really snappy!

• Make it Your Own - Modules let you tune your Gallery to have exactly the features that you want. The module system is so simple that even while we were still in beta, the community had written dozens of modules ranging from facial recognition to slideshows to batch tagging. Download and play with them!

How did we do it?

We have stood on the shoulders of giants. Gallery 3.0 is made possible by some truly great advances in technology.

• Kohana - We evaluated many PHP frameworks before choosing Kohana. It's speed, flexibility and power made it just what we needed. Thanks to the Kohana folks for providing this first class application framework!

• PHP 5 - We're taking advantage of many of the new features and capabilities available in the latest versions of PHP. This allows us to write much less code and have a faster product.

• jQuery - the write less, do more Javascript library. Gallery 3's rich user interface is heavily driven by Javascript and is made possible by the simple and powerful jQuery framework.

Roadmap

Since we're in the home stretch to the final release, we're going to restrain ourselves to UI polishing, cross browser support, performance and stability improvements now. We want to release this to you as soon as possible! A few things that we really want to include in the final product:

• More bulk editing capabilities in the Organize feature
• Improved tagging support
• Basic embedding hooks / instructions

As always, you can track development on our Trac roadmap.

Got feedback?

If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 RC 1 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.