The other day I started to install a new Joomla Extension called "Phoca Gallery" as I'm faced with the problem of having a large library of photos which is residing in "Gallery 2". Where Gallery 2 on its own is a great piece of software, the integration with any Joomla site isn't completely seemless. Depending on the template you're using, bridges that are used to connect Joomla with Gallery 2 face the problems of conflicting scripts from templates, css integration etc.

As I wrote in my post titled Putting Phoca Gallery to the Test, I had tried out Morfeo Show which on its own is a great extension for Joomla, however it doesn't offer any ability for users on the front end to upload photos and create categories, which is one of the main needs for me. 

The first thing I did with Phoca Gallery was to install a large batch of pictures just to see what happens. The first thing I found out is that my existing photo library contains thumb nail folders which will get scanned as part of any album so that require prior cleaning up. In my case this was easily accomplished by simply logging on to the server via ssh and issuing a rescurive delete command on the folders labelled "_thumbs". 

It took quite a while for the 2,500 picture strong batch to get imported and it got stuck a few times on pictures that were corrupt or the wrong format, but every time it gets stuck, Phoca Gallery manages to recover from where it left off and it continues with the thumbnail creation. All of this went OK for me, however due to my initial overlooking of the existing thumbs folders, I had a bit of cleaning up to do afterwards, since the _thumbs folders ended up causing the system creating actual categories based on those folders. 

 Once I had everything cleaned up, I proceeded to test the front end functionality and I must say I was rather disappointed. Where uploading of files is possible, it's not as straight forward as I had wished, and I'm sure I'm going to have to write a lot of documentation for the users on my site to be able to use it with easy. What makes up for this lack of user friendliness is the vast amount of addon modules, components and plugins which make perfect additions to the already great gallery component. From three and category modules, to content plugins for slide shows, statistics and other modules are also available and I'm rather happy with these plugins as they bring a lot of extra functionality to the gallery. 

So, what's my verdict? Overall great extension though I'm not sure how well it's suited for libraries that contain thousands of pictures. The component also doesn't offer any functionality in terms of Community Builder, but judging from reading on the developer's forum of the phoca gallery, I'm sure that's something that will be tackled eventually. For now this is the best solution I can find, I've tried various other integrated Joomla Galleries such as RSGallery and others, however none of them offer the styling I've found both in Morfeo Show and Phoca Gallery.