Can Joomla be used as a photo gallery for large amounts of images?

Question

Frontend:

My intended goal would be the look and functionality of i.e. google image search (masonry style) or tumblr's archive thumbnail-view or flickr. If you click on a thumbnail you'd get a responsive lightbox with swipe functionality.

Backend:

How can you manage large amounts of images in the backend of joomla? I've researched and tested extensions like phoca, but all of them seem to be best used as smaller photo galleries where a beginner can, just with a few clicks, create his family album.

The closest I've come was Event Gallery but on the backend it was more about orders and selling pictures, less about management.

Tl;dr

• primarily for Mobile Users (responsive, swiping)

• 100.000 images +

• ease to use backend file manager or bulk categorizing options

• image rating by guests

• Can be paid up, to ~50$ (no subscriptions)

• Images should be hosted on my server, not google+ or picasa

Thanks for any help :)

Answer 1

When you choose a CMS, you are usually best picking the one which has the most features you need out-of-the-box. The rest you will have to build for yourself (unless an extension does exactly what you need, which is unlikely, or you are happy settling for second best). This requires knowing PHP in the case of Joomla (and, indeed, most open source ones).

On the plus side for your requirements, Joomla does have strong user management, and a nice framework for building extensions with different views.

However, it doesn't have much image handling - things like resizing are not core features. It also doesn't have any shop functionality.

There are open-source photo gallery CMSs out there (first on Google was http://piwigo.org/ - but there are more) , these may be closer to what you want and need less extensions, but are likely to have less technical support and tutorials than the major CMSs like Joomla.

To answer your specific question - yes, it can technically be used as a photo gallery, though any open-source CMS can be extended for that purpose as they are just PHP at the end of the day. I'd personally use it, as I like and know the framework. However, there would be quite a bit of additional coding required.