With the recent release of Gallery 2 and the continued existence of Gallery 1, you might have some questions about the whole thing. This article compares these two products, highlighting their differences, similarities, advantages and disadvantages. It should help you decide which one is better for you, both by offering suggestions and making sure you know as much as possible before choosing. The best place to start is with a brief overview of both products, so you will know the very basics before taking the big plunge.
Gallery 1 and 2 are both web based photo album software, written in PHP. This means that they are meant to reside on a web server, usually in a hosted environment. They use an interface that is entirely web based to make it simpler for you to upload, maintain and show off your images. They both use certain external programs to create thumbnails and custom sized images and they are organized in a hierarchy of folders, with thumbnails of images which when clicked lead to the larger versions of the image. Some of the main features are that it is multi-user, web based, highly automated, flexible and fairly user friendly.
I very recently wrote a quite long and in depth comparison of Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 for the Gallery project. If you are at all interested in the system I use for the photo albums, it might make a good read. You can find the rest of the article here.