Show off your work - Gallery tools for your website
March 7, 2007 by sil63
As I wrote in my previous post there are many tools and applications that let you set up a photoblog in a breeze. But what if you have your own website and would like to show your photos in a gallery or multiple galleries?
As I speak from personal experience, I will write on how I dealt with this issue when I decided I wanted a website of my own.
I know very little of html so I looked around searching for ready-made templates to buy. After a lot of research on the net, I found the Allwebco site. They offer a plethora of pre-made templates especially designed for photography sites. I chose a really simple one that suited my needs very well.
The template came with full instructions and setting up the whole site was a matter of a few days spent resizing the images for the galleries and inserting the right links to the thumbnails and full size versions, organizing menu links and the contact page.
The only drawback with this kind of templates is you have to manually do all the work so that updating the galleries with new images or deleting old ones may require a bit of time on your side.
That’s why I started looking for a piece of software that could help me build and update my galleries more easily. At first, I didn’t mind a little bit of flash effects.
These are the flash softwares/appications I found:
Simple Viewer - Free
Picklish - Free
Gallery Creator - Free
Smooth Gallery - Free
Monoslideshow - Not free
Photofolio - Free version and pro version
All of the above mentioned tools are really nice-looking but I wasn’t able to integrate them in my site - my fault. Besides, they still require you manually write in the links to the images and other CSS related preferences.
I knew about gallery tools such as Coppermine and Gallery, but they require more database space and are full of features which I didn’t really need. The following are the softwares/applications I’ve been considering before making my final decision:
JAlbum - Free. Lots of templates.
Singapore - Free.
Gena Web gallery creator - Free.
Web Gallery Wizard - Not free
And the winner was: Web Gallery Wizard. I found building multiple galleries with this tool is very easy and fast. The software takes care of everything (picture resizing, thumbnails generation), I only had to write captions, give the gallery a name and upload it to my website.
Web Gallery Wizard lets you custom crop your thumbnails so you don’t have any extra space around them and it’s also possible to show your visitors high res versions of your pictures.
If you need support on their site you’ll find a really useful Faq section and a detailed step by step Guide on how to use the software.
You can see it in action in my gallery.
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