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That is a hard one to advise you on. But, read this thread — especially the two posts by Andy (the 4th and 16th posts). Perhaps that will give you sufficient information to make up your mind.

Well, on the 16th post Andy says

If the plugin continues to improve and sticks to the standards then I’d like to allow Manoj to continue building it as the official component. We’ll see how it pans out over the next little while.

What happens if he doesn’t and the plugin isn’t up to Andy’s standards?

Yeah, I know Andy also said we didn’t have to worry about the pictures already in the albums but how will it work? How much work will it take to switch to core photo album component from the Manoj’s plugin in case Andy decides against using it?

I am not asking those questions to get the answer here. I’m just trying to say I am hesitant to using Manoj’s plugin until we know a little bit more about the future of the core photo album component.

And trust me I desperately need a photo album for my website. It’s really hard to resist using Manoj’s plugin especially after reading so many good reviews. I just hate to take a road without knowing where it’s going to take me. Yep, I got burnt in the past.

Your call Robert. No one can predict the future. If your site is that heavily dependent on photos maybe you should wait? But you could be waiting a long time I imagine.

If you look at the roadmap, there is no mention of an photo album (or gallery) plugin. That does not mean it will not happen, it just means that it is not a priority up through v1.4. It also does not mean it will not happen before v1.4.

As with all open source projects, community contribution can significantly drive a project’s evolution. If Manoj, or someone else, comes up with what Andy (and the community) believes is an acceptable photo album component, it could get merged into BP core. Will that happen before v1.4? Will that happen at all?

Right now, Manoj’s plugin is a strong candidate. But, it does have a ways to go. In speaking with Manoj, he has said that he is waiting for v1.1 to come out before he upgrades and improves his plugin. That makes sense.

I have also discussed with Manoj the desirability to evolve his plugin into an overall media plugin–not just for photos. I personally believe that having a photo album plugin as a core component is of limited use in this day and age. Any core BP component, in my opinion, should offer as wide of a range of services as is practical. Here is what I said in another thread:

It would be nice to see an option to upload other media types as well. People not only have photos, but video, audio, text, pdf, and other document formats that could all be organized around the concept of media.

An album, then, would be a user’s place to add all the media types that they wished to share and organize. There could be sub-albums with an option to group by date, by media type, or by category or tag.

I’d rather wait as well, but I also want to give our users something to use in the meantime.

Manoj’s plugin has some code in the background for future releases (such as privacy), but it hasn’t been implemented yet… probably waiting for BP 1.1, like Jeff said to continue work.

I’ve modified Manoj’s plugin slightly to add a couple of template tags in the meantime.

I suggest to un-expert people to wait, if you know you can write code to port your non-core album to the built-in component, feel free to use the Manoj plugin.

That’s a good plugin, if you know you can, use it!

That’s the better way to learn dev languages