I recently migrated my photos to Gallery 2 (for now, coexistent with my Gallery 1 installation, which I haven’t removed yet), and I don’t like it. I can’t do rectangular thumbnails anymore, the new slideshow mode is atrocious, URLs are uglier (I think there is an URL rewriting plugin, but I haven’t gotten around to playing with it yet), the vanilla non-customized site is hideous, and performance is terrible.
I would have just stayed with Gallery 1, but my installation is broken for some reason and I can’t upload.
I’m playing with Coppermine a little bit too, but the UI is clunky and some of the basic features – like uploading photos! – don’t seem to work reliably.
I’d like to move to some other open-source photo gallery option with a similar feature set to Gallery or Coppermine. I haven’t had time to research this yet and as a result I haven’t been uploading any new photos. :(
Recommendations would be very welcome.
A friend of mine uses Plogger (http://www.plogger.org/). I don’t know if it has support for rectangular thumbnails, but the interface is well done (from what I’ve heard, I’ve only seen the external interface) and it has WordPress integration. I think it even has support for the Gallery Remote protocol, so you can use many of the same upload methods as Gallery.
You should just switch your whole site altogether: Ever heard of Community Server (http://communityserver.com)? It’s MSSQL-based, written in C# for ASP.NET 2.0 and includes Blogs, Photos (galleries), Forums and Files (downloads section). Blog posts, photos and forum posts can be tagged rather than placed in albums which makes organization easier. This software is used for many MS sites (xbox.com, blogs.msdn.com, windowsvistablog.com, etc.), so it tried and tested, too.