Good way to make a photo website?

April 17, 2008 2:03 PM

What is the best way to set up a photography website?

My girlfriend wants to post some of her thesis photos online. She does not have that many, though in the future she probably will.

Smugmug is definitely nice, but I feel like its a bit expensive (200 for the pro account that lets you use your own domain, which is a requirement for this project).

So once I buy some cheap hosting place, what's the best way to do it? (Or would amazon s3 be good for this?) I got a tip that using a blog hosting platform like wordpress is good for content, but do I want to get into something like Drupal? I'm not necessarily opposed to a project, and I'm somewhat technical, though not good enough to write the html/css myself.

Any ideas?

posted by names are hard to media & arts (16 answers total)

I use PixelPost, which is designed to make one-photo-a-day projects a cinch. Requires a web host running PHP + MySQL, but is super easy to setup.

What about Flickr?
posted by nitsuj at 2:16 PM on April 17, 2008

What about Flickr?
posted by nitsuj at 2:16 PM on April 17, 2008

indexexhibit is really simple and minimal but it is intended for groups of images, etc. like portfolios.
posted by gyusan at 2:16 PM on April 17, 2008

You can also check out zenfolio. Not sure what the costs are.
posted by Silvertree at 2:35 PM on April 17, 2008

for $35 you can get an account and a website for a year and make your own. I use a little thing called thickbox to display the photos on my own portfolio site.
posted by joelf at 2:39 PM on April 17, 2008

zenphoto is supposed to be really easy to use if you have a webhost with php.

Drupal is probably overkill.
posted by tayknight at 2:50 PM on April 17, 2008 [1 favorite]

zenphoto IS really easy to use, and there are plenty of themes that will help you get the look you want.
posted by natabat at 3:02 PM on April 17, 2008

One thing to consider is if the photog is interested in simply displaying the photos or eventually wants to run a business off the site; if the latter the ability to upscale and so forth is important. There are any number of photography forums on the net; many of them have dedicated subforums on "where to host my photos". I spend time at The Radiant Vista, Photography on the Net (geared towards Canon shooters but lots of good info) and PhotoCamel. There are many others, though.
posted by TedW at 3:03 PM on April 17, 2008

viewbook.com is the best thing I've found so far. They are hopefully taking it out of beta by the end of the month. Otherwise, flickr. It sucks but it's easy.
posted by sully75 at 3:09 PM on April 17, 2008

I use JAlbum. It's freeware and cross-platform. If you have the hosting space, JAlbum creates the html files from your photos. You just copy and paste the resulting files to your web server. There are a number of different skins to choose from too.
posted by monarch75 at 4:29 PM on April 17, 2008

Gallery2 is lovely, and it integrates well into Wordpress and Drupal, if that's what floats your boat.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:39 PM on April 17, 2008

Gallery2 is pretty sweet. I've only done one direct install and a couple integrations, but it's got a lot of really neat functionality.
posted by TomMelee at 6:13 PM on April 17, 2008

Simpleviewer is flash-based, but really easy to use. They have good instructions and tutorials on how to use it. No coding required!
posted by thenormshow at 10:51 PM on April 17, 2008

n'thing the "get a free PHP gallery program like Gallery2 and put it on some cheap shared hosting".

Please, no flash.
posted by polyglot at 11:14 PM on April 17, 2008

Drupal's definitely overkill. You COULD build a pretty nice photo site with it (we do training workshops for new drupal devs, and one of the first exercises is building flippr.net, a flickr clone, without writing any custom code), but for what you want to do it's probably way more work than necessary.

A simple Gallery2 install, as someone else mentioned, is probably a lot more straightforward. I'llhave to check out zenphoto, it sounds interesting...
posted by verb at 11:00 PM on April 18, 2008

Cool, these are a lot of help. I guess I'll go with a cheap hoster like dreamhost that does one click gallery2 installs, but would there be benefit with going with amazon ec2 and s3 to save money?
posted by names are hard at 11:02 AM on April 19, 2008