What's the best online picture gallery you have come across?

June 23, 2009 8:56 AM

What's the best online picture gallery you have come across? Priority is the user-interface ( ease of navigation ) than the quality of the pictures themselves.

I am a full-time programmer and one of my main hobbies is Photography. I wanted to implement an online picture gallery borrowing some ideas from excellent picture galleries and portfolios photogs have put together. What are some sites in your opinion are awe-inspiring not necessarily due to the quality of the photos but due to style and presentation? Some minor positive factors are keyboard navigation support, ease of access to the large photos from the medium ones or thumbnail etc, how the exif information is presented etc.

posted by Juggernut to Technology (12 answers total)

The Corktown Ukulele Jam recently added a member gallery here. It runs as a slide show but you can also mouse over the bottom and scroll through a strip of photos.
posted by bonobothegreat at 9:03 AM on June 23, 2009

Fotagraft
posted by Señor Pantalones at 9:13 AM on June 23, 2009

I'm not a photographer, but I definitely prefer Google's Picasa web albums over Flicker. Picasa's desktop suit will also build pretty okay HTML albums for you to upload to your own host.
posted by wfrgms at 9:23 AM on June 23, 2009

Smugmug.

They're support is fantastic. It literally seems like they have a group of people sitting around waiting for emails about functionality or help.

Couple of other points:

1) They support video
2) They support HD video
3) The price is competitive (although not free)
4) They support tags and comments directly from iPhoto (this was a major priority)
5) Completely customizable gallery look/feel
posted by shew at 9:31 AM on June 23, 2009

Jalbum is a windows-based gallery-maker, which has implemented "Skins" as a way of changing the appearance of galleries. Most are user-created, so there are a lot of different interfaces. I haven't used the software in a while, so I don't have any in particular to recommend, but you can browse the skin gallery, check the highest rated or most downloaded.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:32 AM on June 23, 2009

I'm really happy with Smugmug, too. The "pro" account is even more customizable, but their "regular" level is great, too.
posted by desuetude at 9:35 AM on June 23, 2009

Smugmug ++

Definitely worth the cost.
posted by dzot at 9:36 AM on June 23, 2009

I use the Gallery project, which is a free, open-source application that uses PHP & mySQL on your own server. Very well done, highly customizable, and a living project that is still growing - 2.3 is nice, 3.0 is around the corner. It does handle EXIF data, multiple sizes, slideshows, remote clients on your PC / Mac, and other goodness - Keyboards are the only one I'm not sure of offhand.
posted by GJSchaller at 10:56 AM on June 23, 2009

Best answer: If you're just looking for visual style, out of all the photographer website's I've seen this is one that has impressed me most:

Alex Prager

The webby award for photography sites are always pretty stupendous:
Best Use of Photography 2009
Best Use of Photography 2008
posted by ztdavis at 7:37 PM on June 23, 2009

Also recommending smugmug.
posted by primer_dimer at 2:55 AM on June 24, 2009

If you have your own web space, I highly recommend Zenphoto.

Once you set it up, you just upload folders of photos and it deals with all the rest automatically - just like Flickr or Smugmug etc.

This way you keep full control, you can host as much as you like and it's free and open-source.
posted by icheyne at 4:15 AM on June 25, 2009

SimpleViewer has some great products
and lightbox 2 is pretty customizable

if you're looking to design your own, but not totally from scratch.
posted by hlkljgk at 8:41 AM on June 25, 2009