Gallery 2 can be installed on many webhosts with a few mouse clicks and no technical knowledge thanks to [is http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico.php Fantastico]. You can check the control panel of your website to see if Fantastico (or other auto-installers) are available.
Fantastico replaces Gallery 2's own installation wizard. Instead of going through the official multi-step installation wizard, creating your own database and storage folder, Fantastico does that all for you.
Gallery 2 installed by Fantastico is identical with the official release of Gallery 2 that you can download from the official Gallery website.
All you need to enter is a new username and password for your new Gallery installation, Fantastico does the rest.
Optionally you can:
With a mouse-click the new Gallery is installed and configured for you. You can login with your admin username / password and start creating photo albums or change settings in the administration area.
A Gallery 2 installation consists of two parts: The Gallery 2 application which is the same for everyone, and the Gallery data (your photos, comments, users, etc). As with the normal upgrade process, a Fantastico Gallery 2 upgrade consists of two parts: First you need to update the Gallery 2 application and then the Gallery data.
In the control panel of your website, select to upgrade Gallery 2. This will upgrade your Gallery 2 application. You are then asked to follow the upgrade steps in Gallery 2's official upgrade wizard to upgrade the Gallery data.
While this automatic installation can be nice, it is failing more often than not on a number of installations and providers. This can be due to a number of issues. A common, subtle issue is related to the existence and version of the underlying graphic manipulation programs (jpegtran, imagemagick, etc). If you are having problems with thumbnail and resized photo creation, and have tried disabling GD and square thumbnails already, it could be related to this. One workaround is to, before uploading any photos or modifying your installation, run the Gallery install manually (http://example.com/gallery2/install/ for example). The answers Fantastico setup for you will be pre-filled in as picked up from the config.php file. Key is replace the database in step 6. If this run of the install fails for any reason, simply use Fantastico to delete the installation and reinstall. If you were upgrading instead of doing a new install, you may have to recover your backup.
Doing this reinstall can be a good and convenient time to move the storage folder to a non-web-accessible area for security reasons. Note this action as well as running the install itself will not require shell access but will require using some sort of cpanel-like file manager to manipulate directories, permissions and do simple edits on a few files (login.txt, .htaccess). Fantastico has still saved you the manual steps of creating the database and user, as well as uploading and unpacking the source files.
Running the install script again seems to work better at checking for the existence of the underlying programs and thus disabling those that do not exist. But even with this, we have found very old versions of the binaries for these programs existing. The Gallery install script is not checking for this and still enabling programs that are so out of date that needed options are not available. After completing the reinstall, you may wish to still go in and "test" each graphic program enabled manually to see if it is completing the test completely without error.
Fantastico is a product by Netenberg and in no way affiliated with the Gallery Project. Gallery can be freely redistributed by anyone under the terms of the GPL.
