Johnny91 in general my website gets around 7K visitors, with many gallery views and downloads, and with other scripts I used such as wordpress, and my vps is strong enough to manage this. with this script, there is no reason in the world that it shouldnt be able to handle that much visitors with the usual amount of downloads? I guess around 20-30K downloads, which again barely increase my cpu host.
I can't specifically answer for your own server vs "7K visitors" (this is per day or month)? Files Gallery is built for maximum performance, and it caches folders and menu (until you make changes), so it doesn't really get any more performance-friendly. As for "downloads", this is handled by direct file requests (there is no server processing in PHP involved), and your server should be able to handle a lot of simultaneous file requests. Especially if it is VPS / virtual dedicated server. I can't see any problems here no.
Johnny91 the thumbnails of the gallery albums, I noticed that it randomly chooses a thumb, is it possible for it always to use the first image of the gallery as a thumbnail?
Depends what you mean "first image". It already uses the "first image" as defined on the server (likely date), but this will not match first image that displays (by default set to "name"). Besides, if user toggles the sort option, "first image" will change of course. There are two options if you want to control the preview image.
Create file named _filespreview.jpg
in each dir, which will be used as preview image, and otherwise hidden from the actual gallery.
https://www.files.gallery/docs/config/#folder_preview_default
Or modify this line in index.php
:
$images = @glob(glob_escape($path) . '/*.{jpg,JPG,jpeg,JPEG,png,PNG,gif,GIF}', GLOB_NOSORT|GLOB_BRACE);
Change to:
$images = @glob(glob_escape($path) . '/*.{jpg,JPG,jpeg,JPEG,png,PNG,gif,GIF}', GLOB_BRACE);
With the change above, it will normally find the first image by "name" instead of "date". It's not bulletproof that it matches the first name in the gallery, and it won't match if user has changed sort options of course.
This option is not locked to license. Did you try some simpler CSS first just to see if the CSS applies? Have you added the CSS in the correct location? The only other reason, could be if you have something like NGINX cache which is caching the main document output without including the CSS. I can only diagnose further with a link.
https://www.files.gallery/docs/css-styling/