Web gallery software?

davemdsn · 07-15-2008, 05:18 PM

I am tired of building web pages one at a time to assemble a web gallery. Lightroom was okay for making flash galleries, but that is still a little too small scale for me. I like how I can just upload photos to sites like Flickr, but then I am sharing the site with the rest of the users. I have my own domain and plenty of server space. I would like to upload photos to a gallery there in the same manner as I do to Flickr.

I am wondering if anyone here has used Gallery or Coppermine, or something like that and what their experience was.

Thanks in advance.

*Venturi* · 07-15-2008, 07:54 PM

I've been using Gallery2 for quite a while and it is quite powerful - which makes it pretty heavy and can be slowwwww once your database starts growing. The biggest thing I don't care for with it is there's no way to efficiently categorize photos beyond making physical "albums". The database stores info about each album and photo but the physical storage is still folder based. It has keywords and they are searchable, but there's no way to build out the site so the viewer can switch around how they're viewing it really -- like by camera or lens or artist or macro... You can set up additional (sub)albums and "copy" photos into multiple places but that is just clunky for me.

I've been looking at SlideShow Pro and will be giving it a try out (I need to upgrade my version of PHP past 4.3.10 first) as I am also wanting to go with a flash or javascript based gallery solution. I seriously considered developing my own but I just don't have the time it requires for that kind of personal project right now.

Cloudy Wizzard · 07-16-2008, 01:32 AM

I think Slideshow Pro can make flash based albums.

but I don't know if you can search the album on lens, camera, ...

Also I guess there is a difference between Slideshow Pro and Slideshow pro for Lightroom ??

pw-pix · 07-16-2008, 03:50 AM

I haven't used it, but the latest version of jalbum makes good looking and usable galleries.

Cloudy Wizzard · 07-16-2008, 04:27 AM

AlbumShaper is also a nice tool (but I think it only supports JPEG so might not be as easy as SlideShow Pro for Lightroom which can work with the RAW's straight out of Lightroom).

Advantage of AlbumShaper is that you can run it on both windows and linux, the albums are also pretty nice (but it doesn't have any feature to sort it just displays the photos in the order you've setup).

raz-0 · 07-16-2008, 10:55 AM

Gallery 2 is pretty decent for being free. Especially if you can throw some web design at it.

If you don't mind using FTP, more option open up.

davemdsn · 07-16-2008, 03:09 PM

I have decided to stick with exporting lightbox galleries and embedding them in my own pages. It is what I have been doing but was looking for something a little easier to add to or update. This is actually already pretty easy so I'll stick with it. Thanks for all the replies.

Cloudy Wizzard · 07-17-2008, 02:17 AM

Originally Posted by davemdsn

I have decided to stick with exporting lightbox galleries and embedding them in my own pages. It is what I have been doing but was looking for something a little easier to add to or update. This is actually already pretty easy so I'll stick with it. Thanks for all the replies.

If you have Bridge (so if you own Dreamweaver CS3, Photoshop CS3 or any other Adobe program that comes with Brige) you can get somekind of expansion for Bridge to make galleries.

I don't know if this is easier then what you are using now but if you have Bridge it might be something to look at ?

**Adam** · 07-17-2008, 05:06 AM

I've used coppermine on previous sites, and it's a nice solution if you plan on working on everything through your browser.

Other galleries, like Picassa, are accessible directly from your desktop, so it just depends on preference. If you like having a customizeable gallery and have basic mysql setup experience, I'd go with Coppermine. The newer versions have accumulated quite a bit of features, too!