I moved all my photos over to my Synology NAS (which I really enjoy) just to discover that it would take months to index all photos. So I started to look for options and while most people managed to increase the speed a bit by reducing the quality of the thumbnails I figured why not utilize some of the CPU power I have at home?

So I ended up using my Linux box to do the thumbnailing for me instead which reduced the time to thumbnail 30.000 photos down to hours.

Around 10 years ago I wrote a custom gallery in php it was nice and all but since it is abandoneware it is starting to get less and less usable. So I decided on Gallery 3 to replace it and I thought Id share some observations on it here. So how does Gallery 3 stack up? Was it all the modern “web 2.0 social experience” I expected?