I initially started building and hosting my online photo album using JAlbum. Although an excellent piece of software, my photos are now hosted using a Gallery3 solution The decision was not easily made. Comparing the two packages is like comparing apples to oranges. But given that I had to choose and knowing others might have the same dilemma, I decided to present some of the pros and cons of each solution.

JAlbum Pros

• Simple process of adding, managing and generating albums
• Beautiful themes/skins
• Can be built and tested offline

JAlbum Cons

• Long processing time for large albums (15 minutes for 3000 photos)
• Long upload time especially if re-organizing or switching theme and the entire gallery needs to be uploaded
• No easy way to add built-in user comments unless hosted on jalbum.net

Gallery Pros

• Simple to add and manage photos
• Photos need to be uploaded only once
• Built-in user comments
• Photos and albums statistics
• Some very useful modules (e.g. automatic iMobile theme dispatcher)

Gallery Cons

• Less flashy look out of the box
• Can only be managed online
• Relatively complicated administration panel and maintenance
• Modules and themes need to be installed manually (compared to wordpress automatic installation)

Switching to Gallery3 was simple enough, I used my web hosting fantastico automatic two clicks installer and I was up and running with the latest version of Gallery. The process literarily took less than one minute. I installed the "server-add" module, ftp'ed my JAlbum photo directory to the server and added recursively to Gallery. The entire process excluding the upload time took 5 minutes.

I installed few modules such as iMobile theme and dispatcher and choose the excellent grey dragon theme and was completely ported over.