I spent some time yesterday evaluating and tweaking the Original (Online Remote Image Gallery Initially Not As Lovely) photo gallery for use on my website which is currently running an old version of PHP gallery. This got me thinking about the naming of software, and particularly about the fact that while Original is a nifty name for an online gallery script, choosing an adjective to use as a noun can have some interesting effects later on! Read on for the full story.

I’ve been becoming more and more unhappy with PHP gallery for quite some time now, but I hadn’t found a credible replacement until Original came along. For me, PHP gallery has become far too bloated and featureful to the point where it is excruciatingly slow to perform any task (even browsing) on my gallery. I don’t think my gallery is particularly huge, with 26k photos, spanning 113 albums, it’s certainly at the larger end of the scale, but nothing that I wouldn’t expect some well written software to handle. Couple to this the fact that PHP code like gallery is notorious for being a huge security whole in your server and I was keen to get rid of gallery as quick as possible. I should point out that gallery2 might address some of these issues as it is much more modular than gallery 1 ever was. It still wasn’t enough to tempt me to stay with gallery though. Other well-known galleries like coppermine failed the aesthically pleasing test (not that PHP gallery ever passed it either!).

So that left Original. Written by Jakub ‘jimmac’ Steiner, a well known GNOME coder it fulfills most of my requirements:

• Pretty
• Easy to add photos to
• Not bloated
• Easy to hack

I took me about 2 hours to get Original set up, themed and working to my satisfaction which did involve hacking the code a bit. Mainly to change the layout of a few of the pages, if you weren’t as pedantic as me you would probably get away with just creating your own stylesheet.

Now that I have Original setup and ready for photos I have to somehow get all my photos (and preferably their captions and comments!) out of Gallery and into Original! As part of this I would quite like to narrow down the selection somewhat and have my online gallery being a “best of” collection, rather than the canonical repository of my photo collection.

My tool of choice to achieve all this is F-Spot, one of the new bread of Mono apps for GNOME sponsored by Novell. F-Spot already supports creating Original galleries, but doesn’t officially support importing from gallery. More on that in another post. To stay true to the title of this post I want to finish up by pointing out that choosing an adjective “Original” to use as the name (noun) of your software, isn’t the best idea in the world.

The first time I tried to export an Original gallery from F-Spot I gave up and concluded that it wasn’t supported. I went to the File > Export menu, Choose “Export to Web Gallery” and stopped. This option seems to only support exporting to the very gallery program that I’m trying to rid myself of! I didn’t really expect to find support for Original anywhere else (seeing as it’s a web gallery), but just to be sure I checked the other options, Export to Flickr, no. Export to CD, no. Export to Folder… Maybe.

In the Folder Export dialog there is a set of options title “Export Method”, the options are:

• Use Original.
• Use static HTML.
• Plain Files.

The first (and second) times I looked at that dialog, despite the fact that I was trying to export photos to Original, and was conciously looking for the option, I completely failed to realise that “Use Original” was what I wanted. My mind was reading the caption as “Use original folder structure” rather than “create folder structure for use by the Original gallery script”.

I’d like to file a bug on this to get the wording clarified, but I’m having trouble deciding what it should be. Once you know what it is it seems obvious, the O is capital, so it’s not being used as an adjective, but that is a detail easily thrown away by your mind when scanning the dialog! I’m currently favouring a longer caption such as “Use Original Gallery Folder Format” perhaps with Original in quotes. I also think that moving it into the “Web Gallery” export tab rather than the “Folder Export” tab would clear things up immensely.

So, fun and games with software names. What other sofatware uses an adjective as a noun, and does it cause as much confusion as this has?