Online photo gallery for the RedDragon gaming community, documenting player meetups over five years. The gallery ran at zloty.holas.pl from 2007 to 2012, accumulating over 13,000 photos across 28 albums.

The community

RedDragon was a Polish gaming community that organised regular player meetups — both regional and national events. The gallery was the shared archive for those meetups: photos submitted by attendees, organised into albums, browsable and searchable by any community member. At the time of the archived snapshot the gallery had 66,974 visits and a community rating of 4.2/5 from 320 votes.

Content was split into four categories: Zloty ogólnopolskie (229 albums — national meetups), Zloty regionalne (298 — regional meetups), Różne (13 — miscellaneous), Konkursy (1 — contests). Users could register to upload and manage their own photos, add descriptions, and download photo packages (Paczki Zdjęć). Navigation also included a video section (Filmy), a guestbook, and a community members list (Ludzie RD). The contact section listed a Gadu-Gadu messenger number — the dominant Polish IM platform of the era.

The gallery

Built on IMGallery by Dariusz Niemiec with a custom skin designed and implemented by me (footer: "Copyleft 2007 by Holas. Powered by IMGallery © Dariusz Niemiec."). The dark red/maroon colour scheme matched the RedDragon brand. The sidebar carried the full stats panel, a rating widget, a poll, RSS feeds for latest news and photos, and a "rarest viewed photo" widget.

The technical challenge at this scale was typical for 2007: no cloud storage, no CDN, no managed image hosting. Everything ran on shared hosting — PHP gallery software serving thousands of images from a single server. Managing that volume over five years meant handling uploads, organising albums by event, and keeping the installation running as the collection grew.

RedDragon gallery — archived screenshot Archived screenshot.

Gallery taken offline on 28 March 2012 — archived snapshot on Wayback Machine.