Getting zenphoto up and running is not that hard at all. Just create the database, upload the files and run the install. But if you are planning to setup a gallery with thousands of photos and hundreds of albums it will save a lot of time to know a few things ahead of time. Hopefully these handy tips will help with that.

1. Sort through all your photos.

First look through everything and exclude blurred or just plain awful photos. You will no doubt find some, while your at it make sure to rotate any images that need it.

2. Re size everything

If you are on any shared hosting you will have to re size all of your images. those 7MP even 4MP images are way to big for most web hosting servers. It takes large amounts of server memory to re size your large images each time a user views your gallery or during pre-cache. You will end up with no images in your gallery if you don’t re size. A nice size is around 1024×768, I would not go below 600×400. Also note that file size is irrelevant. A photo that is 10MB and 1MP will work, while a 50k 7MP image will not.

If you are hosted with 1and1 your limit is an image size of around 1600×1200.

3. Gallery Structure

You can have as many sub albums as you want. Just don’t create 3 main galleries with 1000’s of photos in each one. This depends upon your server and how much memory you have access to. Having over 5000 images per gallery will generally cause memory problems.

Instead create galleries for a range of topics such as the year the photo was taken or the event. My galleries are grouped by event, such as birthdays, holidays, vacations… It is not a good idea to create non general galleries. If the user visits your main gallery and is greeted by hundreds of small galleries they will get discouraged and only view a small amount before giving up.