Sun, 05 Mar 2006
I use Gallery to display my photos. I am still running version 1. I generally work by using an old version of galleryadd.pl to upload image directories to gallery into a top level Pending folder that no one else can see. There I work on the albums before moving them to other places where they are more generally available.
A little while ago the "Move Album" page stopped working. The dropdown selection was not fully populated with all the albums, and the "Move Album" and "Cancel" buttons were missing.
I eventually got around to investigating what was happening. It turns out PHP was running out of memory. There were messages such as
Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 177 bytes)
in the apache error.log file.
I fixed the problem by adding the following line to the .htaccess file for Gallery, which on Debian is found at /etc/gallery/htaccess
php_value memory_limit 4500000000
which bumps the memory up from about 8MB to about 4.5GB. Overkill? Maybe. But I have enough swap space, and that should hopefully allow me to create zip files for the albums (which gallery does for you) and they'll be of a suitable size to burn to dvd.
The other thing I always do after Debian upgrades Gallery for me is edit config.php (found at /usr/share/gallery/config.php in Debian) and change PhotoAlbumURL and AlbumDirURL to be relative URLs. Otherwise, for some reason I don't fully understand, Gallery runs extremely slowly for me this side of my firewall.
(Note that I have had to write PhotoAlbumURL and AlbumDirURL even though the actual variable names start with a lower case letter in each case. This seems to be some problem related to kwiki. Simply adding an exclamation mark in front of each variable does not help, even though it is needed for the way I have written the variable names. Does anyone know the solution to this problem? Note that the answer is probably not "don't use kwiki" unless it is accompanied by information on what to use instead.)
Why the Gallery developers don't get rid of the check that those URLs cannot be relative is beyond me. I presume they are saving users from themselves, but I dislike software that thinks it knows better than me.
