I had installed Gallery v2 on my Debian testing server. It works very well. Now I had a problem where I wanted to have some images available publicly, while the majority I wanted to keep for viewing on my internal network only. I know that Gallery has permissions, but I decided that a multisite install would do what I wanted.

I started with Gallery installed from the default Debian testing package. This is a standard single instance installation. On the Gallery website there is some information on setting up a multisite installation. The main thing to remember is to make sure that the database and directories for the new instance are created beforehand. Then it is a simple matter of selecting the multisite option during the install. The install is initiated by going to

http://sitename/gallery2/install

The only additional thing I had to do was make a copy of the Apache config file for gallery in

/etc/apache2/conf.d

I then repeated the operation to make a private gallery.

Once the private gallery was completed, I needed to move the contents of the original gallery yo it. This section was missing from the gallery documentation mentioned above, so I had to wing it on my own. Using phpmyadmin I created a backup of the original gallery database. Then I imported that into the new private gallery database. All the actual albums are then copied from the file system to the new albums location. I would not try this if there were any pictures already in the destination gallery.

I now have two picture galleries that are totally independent, and I can easily secure one from being publicly viewable. If you want to test that claim then the public gallery is here and the private one is here.