Easiest way to produce a web image gallery

April 23, 2005 8:33 AM

I have been using 2 methods to generate my web galleries: Picasa to Blogger.com or the web gallery tool within PhotoShop 8cs. The Picasa is nice, but displaying the images in blogger sucks- the images are all in one VERY long column. Photoshop's templates suck, and the resize has limitations on size. Is there an easier way to take my full res images, resize them, enter description, then publish to a html table format?
posted by phredhead to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Uh... use Picasa's export to web feature instead of export to Blogger? What's an "html table format?"
posted by grouse at 8:58 AM on April 23, 2005

Yeah! Use Hello!
posted by abbyladybug at 9:14 AM on April 23, 2005

Irfanview + Filezilla
posted by laptop_lizard at 10:41 AM on April 23, 2005

Hi there. I used to ask this question in every forum I could find and no one ever answered with anything useful.

Below are my favorites.

Jalbum is awesome. It runs on anything, is pretty easy to use (although you may have to try out your settings on a 4 picture image gallery a few times to get it to come out like you want it to for a bigger, more time consuming one), it doesn't cost anything, and it has a large variety of gallery styles.
Jalbum: http://jalbum.net/

I used to use this one. It's pretty well made, but I think it can be a pain to customize sometimes. There hasn't been an update made to it in a long time. I wrote the guy about this last year and he said he would email me when anything happened. Nothing yet.
Antix Web Gallery: http://www.antix.co.uk/webGallery/
posted by redteam at 12:33 PM on April 23, 2005

A lot of people like Gallery, which -- even though I found it cumbersome to use -- and it sounds a hell of a lot easier than your existing workflow (although I have no idea whatsoever what Picasa is). Gallery seems to be extremely popular these days.

I used to use Apache::Album, since all I had to do was throw the images on the web server and it would do all the resizing and presentation level stuff. However, it's fairly tough to get up and running if you aren't root on your web server or if the server doesn't support mod_perl. It was only convenient for me because I had my web server mounted as a network filesystem.

Apple's iPhoto product has a facility to do what you want, and it generates nothing but static content and requires nothing on the part of the web server. But the last time I tried, it produced unspeakably ugly pages.

You might want to look at
posted by majick at 2:35 PM on April 23, 2005

uh. Yeah. Okay. Um, I screwed that up.

You might want to look at Flickr and see how you might integrate it to your site, if none of the above sound good.
posted by majick at 2:37 PM on April 23, 2005

readteam - jalbum looks the easiest - thanks for your help!
posted by phredhead at 4:48 PM on April 23, 2005

If you resize the photos yourself (say with a Photoshop action), folderblog will auto-index files in a given directory and spit them out in a nice blog/gallery format. It requires your server running PHP, but all you have to do is manage the files on your FTP space. I created it just for this purpose (if I take a dozen pictures for a client and want to set up a gallery in 30 seconds, it's a matter of dragging and dropping the five folderblog PHP files and the photos themselves to my FTP client).

Here's a sample of the default template. To add captions, you either upload .txt files to your server space or just use the posting interface, which will also generate the thumbnail files for you. Allows commenting. (A super-beefed up version 3.0 is coming within the month. If you're interested, sign up for the mailing list on the front page.)
posted by rafter at 5:04 PM on April 23, 2005

I havent tried it yet but SPG simple PHP gallery looks promising
posted by Lanark at 2:54 PM on April 25, 2005