I've just finished another round of upgrades to the site.  We're running a shiny and new photo gallery.

A few months ago, I rewrote the blogging engine into a modular, CSS-able, fully validating control.  It was good.  This time, it was the photo gallery that got the rewrite.  Here are a few notable points about the new gallery, and also galleries in general:

• I wrote the new gallery with the intention of making it a reusable control.  As soon as I feel that it's stable, I'll start sharing it with the world; much like the Content Control.
• The new gallery does away with the "choose your options" screen of the past.  The new one is designed to "get straight to the content".  Advanced options are available (but are entirely optional).  I didn't like the fact that people were often confused by choosing options before seeing any pictures.  I like the new way much better, as you get to see the pictures right away.  The new system for category navigation is much easier to use.
• I've added an option for full-text search.  It will let you search both the categorizations and the text description of each image.  It works pretty well. I like it.
• The new gallery makes more use of Javascript / AJAX concepts.  It's got special resolution-detection, so images will always fit your screen perfectly.  The gallery works from the master images, and downsizes them to your screen size on the fly.  I think of it as a way of future-proofing (and not degrading my content in a permanent form).
• CSS is wonderful.  Much like the blogging engine, the new gallery is completely CSS controlled.  The "look" of it is entirely determined by my site's style, and it's looks can be radically altered on some other installation.
• The administration interface is all new and greatly improved.  It makes categorization incredibly fast.  It dramatically reduces the pain of posting new photos.  In fact, I've got special code that reads the EXIF data directly from the photos.  That saves lots of retyping.  I really should get a Canon test file; I've only tested it with Nikon images.  God shoots Nikon.

For the moment, assume that the gallery is unstable.  Let me know if you encounter anything weird.  Come to think of it; let me know what you think of the revisions.  I was trying for a very natural and modular design on this one.

Anybody who's running a .Net website... The gallery script will be open-sourced as soon as the code is proven.  Contact me if you just can't wait until then, and I'll give you a beta copy.