Adding pictures is what is slow for me. I've tried the web interface and the Gallery Remote and havn't liked either of them much. The web interface just isn't practical, and Gallery Remote didn't order things how I wanted easily, and didn't give enough uploading status. Both just choked when I throw a 2meg video clip at them. I think it's an apache problem, but neither failed gracefully.
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This has been my experience too, even taking the approach of putting the files onto the server myself and then asking Gallery to import them from there it would still die if I asked it to import the couple of hundred files I wanted to load it with in one go.
This must be on a person-to-person basis, because I have no problem with the method you mention, Andy. That is how I load all my pictures into the Gallery, and it takes much less time than it has to.

I mean, it has to load the picture, check for EXIF info, and check for image size. Then if the size is larger than your intermediate size, it has to make another image for that size, then it has to make the thumbnail, name all these files, and I'm sure it's doing a couple other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment. All this seems to take about 1-2 seconds an image for me if I'm loading the images from the server.
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Matt