Digital Photo Web Gallery Software?
Posted March 1st, 2005 @ 08:09pm by Erik J. Barzeski
In about two to three weeks I expect to have a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I'll open the box. I'll skim the manual. And then I'll take lots of bad photos.
But they'll slowly improve. I'll keep them in iPhoto and Lightbox.
What I'd like is an easy way to publish my photos. High-resolution JPEGs, with a little space where I can post comments, the camera settings (f-stop, exposure, etc.), and where people can leave their own comments as well. A little piece of gallery software for the Web.
This gallery software should be attractive, functional, and relatively inexpensive (up to $200 or so?). So what's out there? I shudder to think of forcing MovableType into such a role… though if I absolutely had to, doing something like this wouldn't be so bad.
Donate Life
Posted 01 Mar 2005 at 8:36pm #
I spent years looking for the ideal photo gallery software and had several attempts at writing my own. In the end though I realised that http://www.flickr.com did everything I needed and more - and the fact that it's used by thousands of other people means I can benefit from their hacks (the iPhoto export plugin is particularly handy).
Posted 01 Mar 2005 at 8:39pm #
Don't know if you've seen this software or not, but Gallery is a pretty good piece of software. It takes a little bit of work to get it up and running, but it shouldn't be anything too hard for you to tackle.
Posted 01 Mar 2005 at 9:01pm #
You might want to have a look at Shoebox, our new photo organizer. We're hard at work on some really awesome web features too.
Posted 01 Mar 2005 at 9:11pm #
Someone already mentioned Gallery, which is pretty great, but you should also check out Alex King's "Photos." [All of his stuff is top-notch.]
http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/photos/content.php
Posted 01 Mar 2005 at 10:19pm #
So I guess Apple's .Mac service won't do it for you?
Posted 01 Mar 2005 at 10:39pm #
Flickr? Sounds like exactly what you want, except it's a hosted solution.
http://www.flickr.com
Free for all, and if you want to upload a gig per month you only pay around $30/year. Some really nice features in there, too.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 12:42am #
Gallery's been mentioned twice, but I thought I'd add that it has its own decent iPhoto plugin called iPhotoToGallery: http://zwily.com/iphoto/.
(Yes, I'm the author. Don't hold it against me.)
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 4:58am #
I bought myself a Canon 10D about three months ago. Things were fine to start out with, but I soon found that I had files scattered all over my file system. Digital can generate a real mess. So I worked out a workflow and wrote it up on my blog, http://ose.typepad.com/grumpy.
I publish pictures on my blog and on my .Mac homepage. I shoot RAW, use Photo Reviewer to sift out the tragically hopeless shots and Photoshop Elements 3 to convert them to web-sized jpgs that I also put in iPhoto.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 7:20am #
If the machine that has your iPhoto Library on it is Internet-Accessible, I'm writing a PHP app that uses the iPhoto XML file, MySQL and PHP to display just such a gallery. If you'd like to check out what it's currently like, let me know.
--Eric
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 7:41am #
I'd have to agree with D'Arcy and recommend Flickr. It is a hosted solution, but you're given unlimited space and 1GB uploads per month, for only US$41.77.
There's also an iPhoto plugin.
Some of the features:
Users can comment on photos
EXIF information can be displayed along with photos
Automatic resizing of pictures (from small to the original picture)
Creative Commons licenses can be applied to the photos
There's a plugin to integrate a Flickr account into WordPress, but I'm not sure if there are any for MT (haven't looked). Not sure if you're looking for that, though.
Oh, the slideshow is pretty cool, too. 😉
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 7:42am #
Sorry, just one more thing to add. That's US$41.77 a year.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 7:48am #
You can also link to your photos (or anyone else's who allows it) in their various resized states and add them to your websites.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 8:19am #
If you're looking more for something simple than something which has lots of features, I could suggest taking a look at passion. It's fairly new (and yes, only at version 0.5) and it might have some issues, but as far as I can see, it does what you need (and no more, really).
(Yeah, I made it; self-promoting all around)
I made it because I was tired of all the other systems I could find either sucked or had way too many features (Gallery comes to mind)..
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 8:54am #
I'd also recommend Gallery. If you have your own hosting and lots of disk space this is the way to go. If you are taking large numbers of high-res photos, then you could max out either a flickr or .mac account pretty quickly.
The setup is not really too bad, certainly nothing you couldn't handle (if I can, you can). The iPhoto exporter works great. Gallery handles permissions and private albums very well. There is also a feature where you can order prints from various online outlets from within gallery. I didn't think I would use it, but it has proven handy a few times.
Version 1.5 is in RC stage at this point, but I have been very happy with the 1.4 series.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 9:57am #
I have to agree with everyone suggesting Gallery.
I use it with the iPhoto plugin and it's great.
http://elrocco.com/gallery
I let iPhoto send the hi-res and Gallery takes pleasure in doing all the work of creating the thumbnails and mid-size images.
All the EXIF data is there, user picture rating, user comments, viewing stats, etc... pretty complete.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 10:18am #
I found this one: http://www.smugmug.com/
The price from 30 $ to 100 $ per year and unlimited storage space. It's simply great.
Take a look,
Sven
P.S. remember to insert my eMail if decided to subscribe :-))
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 10:39am #
I use BetterHTMLExport to export my photos my iPhoto using a custom template that I created. You can make whatever template you want (including PHP and the like) and then get your photo webpages however you want.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 11:09am #
Could this be something? Stumbled over it 5 minutes ago.
Pixelpost
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 12:00pm #
Perhaps try Singapore. I have not used it myself but several friends have had good experiences with it.
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 1:21pm #
I would suggest looking hard at Flickr. It has an ongoing cost, but if you're just looking for a place to display pics, it's a good deal. There is an iPhoto Plugin. The only thing is that it's not free if you want to create a online permanent portfolio. They limit free users to only 100 pics visible at a time, though you can upload as many as you want. I really like the service, they're a great bunch of people, and they have a good developer's API that lets you do a lot of things you want with presentation without having to deal with the disk space and simple functionality.
It's not exactly what you asked for, and I will take a good look at gallery, but I find that I'd rather be taking pictures than worrying about maintaining site software for the gallery app.
Sujal
Posted 02 Mar 2005 at 7:41pm #
I use smugmug (www.smugmug.com) for photo hosting... they have a little Mac App which can take an iPhoto library and automatically publish it.
I like them because they have unlimited storage for $30 to $100 a year -- it just depends on bandwidth (1 GB to 8 GB a month, depending on account). It's extremely fast, and over the past 14 months I can't say anything but good things about it. Not free, but tons of storage (I'm using about 3 GB, myself), and excellent services.
Posted 03 Mar 2005 at 4:36am #
Just let add yet another (free) app that seems quite worth a look: Galerie by http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/galerie.htm
Posted 03 Mar 2005 at 5:00am #
If you are looking for an inexpensive blogging software and know how to use Terminal.app see nanoblogger.sf.net!
Posted 03 Mar 2005 at 10:37am #
I, too, use the BetterHTMLExport plug-in for iPhoto. I don't care for the look of most of the Gallery albums I've seen, though that's probably due to my own tastes and the fact that most people don't bother to customize the look much. I've found that BetterHTMLExport offers the flexibility I was looking for in developing my own album look & feel.
Other solutions I've considered or played with:
If you just want to post a single photo from iPhoto to a blog entry, Photon allows you
to do so.
If you're okay with Flash, Todd Dominey's SlideShowPro looks REALLY slick. The albums look great, they're quite customizable, you can have it display images from an RSS feed or Flickr and even attach an mp3 audio stream to the slide show.
Posted 03 Mar 2005 at 6:45pm #
i haven't used it, but you can also try coppermine.
i've used gallery, it's not bad. has a zillion options.
Posted 04 Mar 2005 at 9:36am #
Perhaps also throw a look at http://www.imagevuex.com. Yet another photo web publishing service is http://www.pixentral.com!
Posted 07 Mar 2005 at 10:31pm #
I'm a big fan of Apache::Gallery. Yeah, its a mod_perl thing, but it is simple and just works. It's like directory-indexing but for photos. Create a nice directory structure of photos and then just set your default handler inside Apache to the module and it takes care of the rest. No complex configuration, no database backend, no extra crap to deal with.
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 3:18pm #
Went to the driver's license center for the third time this week. Monday was "pictures only" day. Tuesday I found out that there was a problem with my FL license. Today I was told that, despite the fact that I...
Posted 11 May 2005 at 4:40pm #
For those of you that are undecided between Flickr and Smugmug I've done a brief review of them here. (There are also other links to sites with comparisons at the bottom).
Smugmug vs. Flickr
Scott