Photo Gallery Creation

Since this series of articles is about creating a photo website, I need to say a few words about creating a photo gallery. There are many types of gallery, and which style you chose depends a lot on your motives for making the gallery.

If you want to promote your work as art, and yourself as an artist, then you probably want some sort of creative gallery rather than just a series of images. This isn't going to be a simple task, and as much effort will be required in the design concept as in actually coding the pages. Some photographers hire talented web designers to help out with this. Since it's a complex process, I won't go into any detail here.

Instead I'll concentrate more on the type of gallery a photographers might chose simply to display examples of their work, or to present images they hope might sell as stock images. As an example I'll cite my own gallery which you can view via the Gallery Index Page.

My pages were created using Jalbum, which is a freeware package. It's not hard to use, but it's not totally trivial either, especially if you want to modify any of the "canned" themes it comes with. If you want to modify the themes, you'll need to know some HTML and learn some features of the Jalbum scripting language. So although it's a very powerful package, it might not be the best choice for absolute web beginners. My rating is **** (4 stars)

A much simpler, but less flexible, freeware gallery generator is Limon. It will resize images and create thumbnail galleries, slide shows or single pages with images. It also includes a built in FTP function to upload the images to your website. It's 100% wizard driven, so you never have to see any HTML. The downside of this is that you can't easily customize the galleries. My rating is ** (2 stars). Good for beginners.

Webpicture Creator is a very useful freeware thumbnail gallery generator. If you don't want to see HTML, you don't have to. However using a few HTML commands and templates you can create a wide range of gallery styles. If you like tinkering under the hood a little bit, this might be an excellent program to check out. Again this is freeware, at at least donationware (if you use it a lot, the author requests you make a small donation). My raing is *** (3 stars). Here's an example of a very simple set of gallery pages created by Webpicture Creator. This took only a few minutes to create an upload to my website. I made no attempt to "customize" the pages.

If you want a higher end program that can do a lot, you can look at Coppermine. It's a database application that needs some smarts to install on a webserver (and the webserver has to support the requirements of the program), but it could be a good way to go. If statements like "Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick lib with a MySQL backend leave you scratching your head, this probably isn't the package for you! Freeware, open source, but not for the beginner. My rating is **** (4 stars)

Some website hosting packages include something called "Fantastico", which is an installer for a number of open source programs including Coppermine Photo Gallery. Installation is then simple and all the server configuration and script installation is done for you. Both Site5.com and HostRocket.com hosting includes Fantasico and Coppermine Photo Gallery, as well as about 40 other scripts from forums to content management systems.

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