Gallery - Your Photos on Your Website

[James Fee]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://gallery.sourceforge.net/' target='_blank'>http://gallery.sourceforge.net/</a><br /><br /></div><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/gallery.jpg" /><br /><br />There are many ways to get your photos up on the internet. You can use products such as <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/main.html">Adobe Photoshop Album</a> or <a href="http://www.picasa.com">Picasa</a> to create HTML pages you can upload to your site. You can go with a hosting service such as <a href="http://www.mac.com">Mac.com</a> or <a href="http://www.typepad.com/">TypePad</a>. But what if you want to get beyond just simple HTML and allow comments, voting and allow people to upload their own images to your album? Well a great solution I use is <a href="http://gallery.sourceforge.net/">Gallery</a>. Gallery is an open source solution so it will cost you nothing, but does mean you'll need to install it yourself. Gallery requires PHP 4 and Apache Web server (people have gotten it to run on IIS, but it is really difficult). Gallery is used by many people and it seems to be the photo gallery of choice for Presidential Candidates (John Kerry, Howard Dean, RNC and other) wanting to showcase "kissing the babies".<br /><br />As for features, there are more than I can list, check them out <a href="http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpWiki&file=index&pagename=Gallery%20Features">here</a>. The ability to handle comments, polling, EXIF Headers, printing and other functions make Gallery a great choice if you wantto share your photos and movies with friends. I use it to <a href="http://www.tonkinese.net/gallery/albums.php">share pictures</a> of my son with our family all over the world. Gallery allows uploading of ZIP, movie files, digital photos and other formats, as well as being able to watermark your images. With the standard Java interface, you can drag and drop your images for quick uploading. The administration tools allow you to restrict the albums and edit how they will be viewed. Also there is a big community of users who have created skins and other "plug-ins" to allow customization of your Gallery.<br /><br />The best way to learn more about Gallery is play with it. There are hundreds of <a href="http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.php?set_albumName=samples&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_album.php">examples</a> on their website. I tried many different options before deciding on Gallery and I'm glad I picked it. They are quick to release bug fixes and are working on a new <a href="http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=129&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0">Version 2.0</a> which promises to be even better.

[Kent Pribbernow]

Gallery is awesome! It powers my photo gallery. You can check it out here:

http://www.pocketfactory.com/gallery/

[dartman]

Kent,

Where was the antique steam engine show? I go to one in Smithsburg, Md each fall.

dart

[Kent Pribbernow]

Where was the antique steam engine show? I go to one in Smithsburg, Md each fall.

Lagrange Indiana.

[Jason Kravitz]

My friend Aaron and I have created a site called aminus3.com which we hope will serve as a photo blog site for others. It is still in development but fairly complete. There is currently no way to sign up for a user ID but for those interested please contact me.

The idea is you post a picture of the day and others can comment etc on it. There are many other sites that do this. There is not much unique here at the moment but perhaps we will take this in a new direction at some point.

Gallery looks pretty cool too as far as hosting your pictures on your own site - I'm checking it out now.

[Crocuta]

I had checked that out when I recently went through redesigning my own online gallery. Unfortunately, Gallery requires a level of PHP control that I'm not allowed in my shared server environment. I'm not sure that I'd have gone with something that powerful anyway, but anyone thinking of using it should definitely be sure they have the ability to run it on their server before investing too much time.

A good alternative is JAlbum at http://jalbum.net/. It's not as powerful as Gallery, but is still very feature-rich and a great option for those who cannot run Gallery due to server restrictions. I didn't end up using this one either in the end (it just had more than I needed), but was very impressed when I tried it out.

[Littleshmee]

I've been looking for photo gallery software, tried a bunch out, and the best one I can find so far for the server at my school (basically doesn't support anything) is Magic Gallery (http://www.raizlabs.com/software/magic/). It lets you customize everything - you can make templates of the index pages and the individual image pages so that they match your website design. It was the only software I could find that let me use a tableless design.