What good website image gallery solutions are out there?

July 12, 2006 9:57 PM

what's the best way to integrate a photo gallery into an extant website?

the site in question: www.rialtotheatre.com. we had our site designer add a gallery capability but it's cumbersome and we need something better.

ideally, it'd be organized on a per-event basis, with a thumbnail grid for each, label-able and clickable to expand to a high res image.

also, are there efficient ways to upload a directory full of images into the interface? are there interfaces with simple uploading built in? if i'm not being clear enough i can expand on it further in the thread.

posted by Hat Maui to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Best answer: Well, if you use MT as content management, I don't think you can get any better than Doug Bowman's templates. You pretty much have to be a Mac user, though, which is too bad, because I'm not.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for either, but I'm rather fond of zenphoto and have been playing with it lately. It's clean and simple and reasonably featured, and skinnable/theme-enabled with css.

When my camera finally gets back from the shop, I might start taking photos again and have a use for it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:59 PM on July 12, 2006 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: dude, zenphoto is awesome. thanks for that, that's exactly what i was looking for.
posted by Hat Maui at 12:40 AM on July 13, 2006

If you want something even simpler than zenphoto (i.e. doesn't require a database), look me up in my profile and I can email you a tiny piece of PHP that may do what you need.

See it in action.
posted by polyglot at 2:07 AM on July 13, 2006

If your web server has php support, you might want to give Coppermine a try. I'm a PHP virgin and am starting to dabble in it.
posted by JJ86 at 6:06 AM on July 13, 2006

I've let it fall into disrepair (I'll be returning to the project soon, I promise) but folderblog is a script I made that autocreates photoblogs or galleries without a database. It doesn't integrate at all with MT or anything, but as long as your server runs PHP and you have a little HTML or CSS under your belt you can run it really seamlessly. To upload, all you have to do is drag and drop the files to a directory on the server — you can also upload or caption specific photos through the web interface. Incredibly easy to use.

Here's a sample of an out-of-the-box install.
posted by rafter at 3:07 PM on July 13, 2006

(By the way, no programming or coding knowledge is required — when I mention HTML and CSS I mean for changing the visual template — everything else is done through the web interface or editing text files.
posted by rafter at 3:09 PM on July 13, 2006

I am personally enjoying converting all of my old Gallery galleries to Plogger. No small part of my joy in this is that I can now refer to them as plogs!
posted by macinchik at 3:54 PM on July 13, 2006

Byrne Reese has fixed up the Doug's StopDesign photo templates into an MT plugin that's great, and he's not a Mac user. see here.
posted by anildash at 11:02 PM on July 13, 2006

That's very cool, anil. Thanks.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:11 PM on July 13, 2006

polyglot: I just sent you an email but it came back as failed

my msg was:

the fact that http://www.auwsc.com/index.php?page=gallery validates was the selling point for me

in case my profile here doesn't have my email (I had to go to your site), it is in the footer of my blog at http://billy-girlardo.com/blog/

thx, I would apreciate it
posted by BillyG at 8:15 AM on July 14, 2006

I like Rapid Weaver. There a lots of third-party templates and it's super easy to set up a photo gallery (on the Mac)...
posted by livinginmonrovia at 1:38 AM on July 16, 2006