As far as the repositories go there seems to be:
gallery
gallery2
igal
jigl
kallery
llgal
photon
plagiat

anyone use any of these?

I am using Picasa and I have a Picasa web album as well. But to me Picasa is
somewhat strange. It seems to use much RAM and much processing power. When I run
it in order to find some pics in my PC and I also have huge Open Document Text
files loaded (containing pictures also) Open Office sometimes shows the message
"Not responding" and is slow to work with.

I use it on XP, Vista and Ubuntu and have never found it heavy on its
use of RAM. Perhaps its just the amount of graphics you have on your
computer because it will trawl for it all if you do not set it up correctly.

Go to tools > folder manager and make sure you are searching the folders
you want to. If it contains something like "/" it will search your
entire disk and then watch all the images it finds for changes. That
could eat a LOT of memory and CPU bandwidth.

Since posting i've looked up a few and found
llgal which i think suits my needs. I also found krename and pyrenamer
- always wondered what folk do to change file names to avoid
overwriting pics. Both seem to work but the twin window pane in
pyrenamer seems to move across the screen with each use of the app...
umm stay with krenamer!

Looked at Coppermine and others and went in favour of jalblum.
http://jalbum.net/ Its the software behind the pentax users gallery at
http://pug.komkon.org/

its easy but very very configurable.

Looked at a few last evening. Jalbum is good but it isn't quite what i
was after - you upload photos and limited to 30mb - but a good app
though. What i think! i'm looking for is something like llgal
literally as simple as one can go - you just put selected photos in a
directory and run a one line command in the terminal and you have an
album.

jigl is a bit more sophisticated but similar. Windows version as well
so i can teach my sister how to do them!

I have to agree with Ian that I have never found this to be an issue. It is very
thorough and does scan continuously. It is the initial scan that takes a long
time time.

However, it may a reflection of the amount of RAM and processor that we have in
comparison to others. If Ian can run Vista, then he probably has a new and fast
machine. Mine isn't that new, but it has lots of horsepower for what I do with
it. Alexandru likes to run bare bones systems and to get optimal performance.
This could account for our different perceptions of Picasa.

I do have 2210 mhz processor and 1024 RAM on my self
build running Vista and XP but the Ubuntu run on les that half that on
an old machine. Even the big one is small in comparison with today's
computers.