Roger

A brief history of Gallery Server Gallery Server began in 2003 when I took a few months off of work to travel the United States with my new bride. I wanted to share photos of our trip so I thought I would throw something together with the newly released .NET Framework and enhance my programming skills at the same time. I was really happy with how it turned out, so I released it as a 100% free, open source product in 2005. It wasn't long before I added a donate button on the website and started getting donations. For several years, I sent a free Dilbert book to anyone who donated $50 or more. This donation model brought in around $500 - $1000 a month. It was really satisfying to give the product away and let folks pay whatever amount they valued the software. But $1000 a month is essentially [...]

Today we released 4.4.3. It’s a minor update, containing a few bug fixes and no new features. Applying it to your 4.X installation is easy — just copy the files from the upgrade package over your existing installation. There are no web.config changes to merge and you don't have to worry about the version_key.txt file or your license information. Get the upgrade package from your downloads page. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, follow the instructions in the Admin Guide. These are the bugs that are fixed. More details are available on the release history page. Error "Value does not fall within the expected range" when adding image Cannot assign an album owner when the user name contains an ampersand Error when unassigning user as an album owner PrincipalServerDownException when using the AD group provider

Today we are releasing Gallery Server 4.4.2. As with the 4.4.1 release, we continue to focus on performance. Upgrading from 4.X is as easy as copying the files from the upgrade package over your existing files. Performance gains One of our customers, Reto Ambühler in Switzerland, was experiencing large wait times for several common editing scenarios, such as adding an album and creating a role. There was also a significant startup time for the gallery. He generously shared his database with us. It contained 64 galleries, 1403 albums, and 53,000 media assets. We were able to reproduce his performance issues. For example, browsing to a new album took 55 seconds, deleting an album took 38 seconds, and deleting 10 empty albums took a staggering 6 minutes and 22 seconds! Most customers do not experience such poor performance, even with several times more media assets. His scenario was unique because he had a [...]

Today we are releasing Gallery Server 4.4.1. While it includes no new features, it improves performance in several key areas and fixes a few important bugs. We recommend migrating to it immediately, especially since upgrading from 4.X is as easy as copying the files from the upgrade package over your existing files. Performance gains We spent a lot of time profiling Gallery Server, looking for performance bottlenecks in various configurations, from small galleries using SQL CE to large, multiple gallery environments with 1,000,000 assets. We found several opportunities were we could more narrowly purge the cache after certain changes, thereby preventing Gallery Server from having to reload data that didn't actually change. Gallery Server uses an in-memory cache to store a list of galleries and all the album IDs in each. This is expensive to rebuild, especially because reloading it causes a validation routine to run that ensure the integrity [...]

Gallery Server 4.4 is now out of development and in your hands. We updated the tinyMCE HTML editor to the latest version, taking it from 4.5.3 to 4.6.5. This tinyMCE update includes dozens of bug fixes and several new features. A complete list can be seen here: https://www.tinymce.com/docs/changelog/ New feature: Share asset URL We updated the share dialog to include a link directly to the media asset file: This URL is a direct link to your JPG, video, etc. This differs from the page URL, which is a link to the web page containing the media asset. Use the asset URL any time you want to refer to the media asset without the chrome and distraction of the Gallery Server web page. The URL will point to the version of the asset that is currently active in the View ribbon tab. That is, when optimized is selected, the URL will [...]

We love it when customers take the time to give us feedback, regardless of whether it's positive or negative. Today I thought I'd share a compliment we received yesterday from Tom Slaughter at Earth Oasis Computers. The ability to edit the original file metadata is AWESOME. I’ve been playing with it and am so happy I upgraded!! Thanks, Tom!