Publishing collections of images.
THE OPTIONS
A gallery plugin for your content system, which suits most needs A dedicated gallery application, for large collections with complex organisation A hosted service, for portfolios where presentation matters most
WHAT TO WATCH
Storage. Image collections grow rapidly, and each uploaded image generates several resized versions.
Inodes. A gallery with thousands of images and multiple sizes each can exhaust your file allowance before your disk allowance.
PERFORMANCE
Galleries load many images per page. Lazy loading, appropriately sized thumbnails, and compression are not optional.
A gallery page loading fifty full-size images is a common and avoidable performance problem.
ORIGINALS
Keep originals off the server. Upload web-sized versions and archive the originals elsewhere.
There is rarely a reason to serve a twelve-megapixel photograph to a browser.
BACKUPS
Image collections are large, which makes backups slow and storage costly. Consider whether the originals need backing up from the server at all if you hold them elsewhere.
