Ok, I'm at my wit's end. I've looked at the web pages for a half dozen scripts/galleries and none of them list the image formats they support. I'd think this would be a basic statistic/spec to show - at least somewhere.

I do know that the Imagemagick software suite supports reading NEF and can therefore do format conversion, so it would stand to reason that if anything, a gallery that uses its tools would have a better shot at supporting this than one that doesn't.

Can anyone make any recommendations for gallery software that I can install myself on my web site that will support the following:

JPG files (I doubt there are any that don't )
NEF files from a D300 - they'll need to be converted to jpg on the site to be able to be sent to the browser.
EXIF and IPTC metadata
XMP sidecar metadata files

Basically I want to throw my entire image library online in its source format. Primarily this will be used for backup purposes, but I'd also like to be able to browse the library online. The images will be sent with rsync so I'll be able to update as necessary.

Having the gallery and ability to browse the images will conveniently let me get around Dreamhosts's policy of not allowing web storage to be used for general backups.

You could certainly hack something up to convert your raw files to JEPGs in batch, in advance. The CPU overhead of doing the conversion on the fly would be pretty painful.

Converting from NEF to JPG on the fly, with a reduction in dimensions, would likely take less time than serving the original image over HTTP. I'm betting it can be converted and the smaller image served faster than serving only the original.

But, I don't need anything that complicated. Even if the program can simply extract the JPG thumbnail from within the NEF that should be fine for my purposes.

I don't want to do a batch conversion because I don't actually want duplicate JPEG images. I want to use this solution to back up all my originals, which, from now on will be exclusively NEF.

Over the past year I've been shooting JPG+RAW and I'm now about to turn off the JPG option as it's really served no purpose. To give people copies of the images I can easily do an export out from Lightroom. I never let anyone else handle nor access my memory cards directly, so its not like I'd be handing them immediate jpeg images anyway.


UPDATE: Installing Zenphoto on a sub-domain as a test.

You might as well then do a batch JPEG conversion that generates reduced-size thumbnails.

A larger question is what you're trying to accomplish with the web server in the first place. I shoot everything raw, load it all into Lightroom, and my backup solution is a combination of Time Machine (to replicate on a second hard drive) and rsync (to copy the data offsite). A web gallery of raw, untweaked pictures doesn't have all the rich tagging and search capabilities that are built into a professional tool like Lightroom, among other limitations.

I manage all my photos in Lightroom. I already back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule. I'm now going to start to use rsync to back up to my ReadyNAS. I'm also going to use rsync on the ReadyNAS to automate backing up THAT backup to Dreamhost, into my web hierarchy. The gallery is only to keep the backup within letter of Dreamhost's terms of service.

I'll be uploading 130GB of existing images and that's just going to keep increasing. Dreamhost's policy is that your (unlimited) storage space is only to be used to store files that are intended for the web. This is since they actually have limited storage overall and they also back up your web root.

Having the images accessible on the web fulfills that requirement of the TOS and having them linked through a gallery cements it. Plus it does give me some options of sharing some images rather conveniently since they're already on the server and I can set up the gallery to serve specific sizes without actually manually generating anything.

If I just wanted a normal gallery I'd just export directly from Lightroom into any gallery script since they all support JPG.

dcraw will extract the embedded image from pretty much any RAW format. It will also convert the RAW to a bitmap pixmap for use with the magick tools.

Cheers

dcraw is the reason I'm installing Gallery 2 right now. Zenphoto for all its descriptions and proclamations of "simpler" and better also didn't list its supported image formats until well after setting it up.

I'll post some results once I get this all tested out, maybe tomorrow. I think it's going to take me at least 2-3 months to actually upload all my images to Dreamhost though. Ugh. If the 120MB transfer limit of my ISP wasn't bad enough, upload speeds also seem to max out at about 65KB/s.

I rsync from my home to my work, where nobody cares that I've got a big Firewire drive hanging off the back of my machine. If that's not feasible for you, you could always work a deal with a friend, where you mutually sync to each others' remote storage. You can do the initial rsync at home, on your LAN, then you're only doing incrementals over your DSL/cable modem line.

Gallery, once you've manually compiled/installed dcraw, seems to display NEF images on the fly without any fuss. Currently it's lacking the display of any metadata for such images however. But that's not of huge concern for my current needs.

Gallery also lacks any ability to read xmp sidecar files (for updated metadata not embedded in an image), but again, this interface is primarily just a way to occasionally browse into my backups and a way to work around Dreamhost policy restrictions.