Software

Details: Created: 30 August 2026

Some years ago I wrote about MIDI controllers and Lightroom. That setup got me through many weddings, but I never really stopped looking for something better. This year I ended up writing my own tool: Maschine2LR turns a Native Instruments Maschine Mk3 into a control surface for Lightroom Classic. Eight knobs that know what they control, two screens that show it, and pads for ratings, flags, crop and masks. Here is why I built it, how it works and what it took to get there.

Details: Created: 14 August 2026

Event Gallery 6.0.0 is out, and it is a big one. There is a new menu item type that lets you hand out one link and a password instead of a personal link per customer. The Ajax List layout stopped guessing how many thumbnails fit on a page and started measuring. There is a full promotion engine with discount rules, condition rules, promotion codes and personalized single-use codes. Visitors can now get an image inside an email instead of a link to it. And Google Photos via the API is gone for good.

This post walks through all of it, including the boring parts: option names, defaults, limits, what happens to your database on update, and what you have to touch by hand afterwards.

The short version of the requirements: 6.0.0 needs PHP 8.2 or newer and Joomla 5, 6 or 7. The Joomla 7 support came from removing deprecated code and moving to current coding standards, so if you were waiting for that, this is the release.

Details: Created: 03 June 2021

Today you might have seen emails from Google telling you details about your Google App which handles your Google Photos credentials.

First, don't worry! But you might need to do something.

Details: Created: 21 October 2018

There is fantastic news about Google Photos. With Event Gallery 3.10 they'll work even after January 2019. The process of getting Google Photos is slightly more complicated, but I made a tutorial video to get you started. Check the article for limitations and implementation details.

Details: Created: 25 September 2018

A couple of years ago Google started Picasa Web Albums. A great place to upload your photos and make them available on the internet. By providing an API, getting data directly from the Google servers has been possible. The API was pretty straightforward, and it was more or less comfortable to show Picasa Albums on any website. Then they introduced Google+ and Google Photos. But the Picasa Web API remained working.

Details: Created: 18 May 2018

While I provide support, I see a lot of Joomla sites. Most of them can improve their security by some simple steps. Here are my favorite tips to secure a Joomla site.

Don't use the admin user. If the username is known, it is much easier to guess the password. There are a lot of brute force requests to the login form which are usually undetected. You could see that in your server log files, but I guess you don't know where they are located, or you don't check them. So create new superuser accounts and delete the admin account.

Details: Created: 10 May 2018

We all know that we need to take care about data privacy stuff until 25th of May. That is right for my website, too. But I also need to make sure Event Gallery is covered and help you to get compliant.

The next release will add a new chapter in the manual which describes, how Event Gallery collects data.

Also, there will be some changes codewise. Right now there are a couple of external scripts loaded. Even if this is in the backend, I remove them to avoid that somebody has to deal with that.

Details: Created: 22 March 2018

Using just the main component of Event Gallery might get boring. So what should you do? Why not using Event Gallery as your personal image server? Just add images to your articles. It is as easy as this. Just have a look at the video below.

Event Gallery is more than just a gallery component. Besides the fact that you can sell images, you can use it to manage your image content. Upload your image and insert them into an article. Event Gallery will take care of scaling the images to the right format and offers the lightbox out of the box. Adding simple thumbnails is one thing you can do. Having a full gallery in an article is possible as well. If you need just a bunch of images to tease your stuff and want to show the rest of the photos in a lightbox: that is possible! With the content plugin of Event Gallery you can do a lot of magic stuff.

Details: Created: 10 February 2017

This weekend Google switched off the option to modify any album using their Picasa API. The tool I provided basically stopped working from on day to another. You can't switch the visibility of an album. Does this mean you can't use new albums with Event Gallery? No! It still works. It just requires you to perform one more step. You need to allow Event Gallery to access your album data. Afterwards you can even use those protected albums! This was not possible before. Let's see how long this works.

If case you have a valid subscription you can already try it by getting the latest build from here Alpha Release.

Update: Event Gallery 3.7.0 is available and can access protected Google albums.