Hands on: DIY galleries

How to create custom photo galleries with the minimum of fuss

There’s no denying the huge demand for web photo gallery space. Everyone from travelling gap year students to wedding and event photographers is looking for a way to get their images on the web with minimum hassle.

The huge growth in popularity of photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, Smugmug and Pbase shows that if there’s one thing people like to do with their pictures, it’s put them online. But while such sites are popular, there are reasons why you might prefer to host photos on your own site.

DIY hosting means you can set up your web photo galleries exactly as you want them. You have control over their presentation and can design your gallery pages to fit in visually and functionally with the rest of your site.

For professional photographers, maintaining this kind of control is important and, providing you have – or have access to – the necessary web development skills, you can provide additional features, such as image searching and ecommerce facilities.

Integration
Weekend snappers will be attracted by the ability of some online gallery applications to integrate with blogs, and for those on a tight budget who want to add a photo-sharing section to their own sites, there are several open source applications available.

This month, I’ll run through some of the options for getting photo galleries online, covering everything from automatic static page HTML gallery production to PHP and MySQL-based applications for running a full-blown interactive, Smugmug-style photo-sharing site. I won’t be going into great depth but, whether you’re about to embark on gap year travels with a point and shoot camera, or are a professional taking the first steps to putting your contact sheets online, it’ll give you an idea of where to start.

For a static HTML web album, the first place to look is your photo-editing application. It should have an automated script that takes a folder of photos a nd turns them into a web gallery at the press of a key. In essence, these down-sample the originals and save them as Jpegs in two sizes – a small thumbnail preview and a larger image for viewing. The small images link to the large ones and are displayed contact sheet-style.

HTML pages are created for all the images, together with forward/ back/index navigation buttons. All that remains is for you to upload the folder containing the HTML pages and images to your web server via FTP.

Photoshop’s Web Photo Gallery is one of the most versatile. You can specify the size and compression of the thumbnail and large-size images, choose from the filename, title, description, credits, title or copyright metadata fields to caption images, and add a page banner that includes fields for the site name, photographer, contact info and date.

Two features that professional users may find useful are the ability to preserve all the image metadata and a security option, which adds a visible watermark to each large image.

Photoshop Elements provides similar features in its HTML photo gallery. It lacks some of Photoshop’s captioning options and the metadata and security features, but it has a far wider range of style templates.

If you’re a recent convert to Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, you’ll be disappointed to learn that Corel has replaced Photo Album 6 with Snapfire, an easier to use photo organiser that lack’s Photo Album’s Web Gallery feature.

A limited edition of Photo Album 6 shipped with Paint Shop Pro X and earlier versions. If you have one of these and upgraded to the full version, you have the means to produce a serviceable web photo gallery with a few minutes’ work.

Photo Album 6’s gallery lacks the versatility of Photoshop’s and the templates aren’t up to the same standard, but at least it has a built-in FTP upload facility.

If you don’t like the way your pages look, you can always edit the pages after they’ve been created using a basic WYSIWYG web editor or manually if you know a smattering of HTML. Or you could have a crack at editing the templates. There isn’t space to go into detail on how to do this here, but Photoshoppers can make a start by looking in Program files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Web Photo Gallery.

Lightroom and Aperture, the next-generation, professional image-processing applications from Adobe and Apple, take web gallery production a step further with WYSIWYG tools and live previews. One drawback of most photo-editing applications is that you have to create the gallery to see it (and more often than not, go back and edit it before recreating it several times over until it’s right).

Live preview
In Lightroom, a live preview updates as you make selections from the template browser and choose label, colour palette, layout, image settings and other options. You can also preview the site in your browser, though as the site has to be temporarily created, this is no quicker than actually exporting it. Like Photoshop, Lightroom (but not Aperture) can also create web galleries as flash .swf files.

Other photo editors that include web gallery tools include Ulead Photo Impact Album, ACDSee and Irfanview. As I said at the outset, it’s pretty much a standard feature, so check out your chosen photo-editing application to see what it has to offer before looking elsewhere.

Despite the fact that there are any number of paid-for and free photo-editing applications that can produce web photo albums, standalone applications proliferate. If the website is to be believed, there have been more than two million downloads of Jalbum, a Java application that runs on Windows, Mac OS, Linux and anything else that supports Java 1.4.

Jalbum creates static template-based HTML pages and image folders. The appearance of pages can be altered using album themes called skins. Several are supplied and you can create your own.

Slideroll Gallery AV (formerly Picklish), another standalone web album generator, is available for Windows and Mac OS. It produces Flash photo and video galleries and has a simple drag and drop interface, where photo captions are displayed in a balloon when you hover over thumbnails, which is quite cute.

The web gallery tools looked at so far create static HTML web pages (or Flash movies). This is fine if you only want to get your images up there for someone else to look at. But to get any kind of interactivity – for example if you want to invite comments, sell your photos or enable others to upload pictures – you’ll need to look at database-driven applications. To run these, you’ll need a web server with database support and, in most cases, PHP.

Gallery is an open source project to develop photo-sharing web applications using PHP scripts. It has produced three applications to date – Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 (both photo album organiser applications) and an uploader called Gallery Remote. As Gallery 2 is a development of Gallery 1, this would be the obvious choice. Gallery 2 is module based, has more features and is easier to install and maintain.

About the only reason you might have for choosing Gallery 1 in preference to 2 is that the earlier version isn’t database-driven, so if your hosting provider doesn’t support databases, or if the idea of installing and configuring one doesn’t appeal, go for Gallery 1. Gallery 2 supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2 and MS SQL Server.

Another good reason for choosing Gallery 2 is that its theme system, which determines the layout and appearance of web pages, is highly customisable.

As well as integrating the look of your Gallery pages into your existing site, you can also functionally integrate it with other applications. For example, if you run a Wordpress blog, you can use the WPG2 plug-in to seamlessly integrate and display Gallery content in your blog entries.

Integration modules are available for a growing list of applications including CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Geeklog, Mediawiki, PHPBB and Zen Cart. For a full list, go to http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:Integration:Available_Integrations.

Alternatives
Other open source photo gallery applications include Coppermine, Plogger and Gallery Server Pro. Coppermine has a similar feature set to Gallery 2; it’s PHP and database (MySQL) driven and, like Gallery 2, uses either the open source GD or Imagemagic graphics suites, one of which is most likely already installed on your server.

As well as the basics, such as thumbnail and full-size image creation, search, user management, EXIF/IPTC support and commenting, Coppermine features include a random picture generator, ecards, bbs integration and a slideshow viewer.

While Plogger doesn’t appear to have the same degree of community support as Gallery or Coppermine, it’s relatively simple to install and use. It features commenting, web-based uploading, RSS support and Javascript slideshows.

Gallery Server Pro is another open source application, but unlike those previously mentioned it’s not reliant on PHP and MySQL. It’s an ASP.Net application that runs on Windows with Microsoft.NET Framework, IIs and SQL server.

Links
Gallery (open source) http://gallery.menalto.com
Jalbum (freeware) http://jalbum.net
Picklish (freeware) www.picklish.com
Coppermine (open source) http://coppermine-gallery.net
Plogger (open source) www.plogger.o rg
Gallery Server Pro (open source) www.galleryserverpro.com
Zenphoto www.zenphoto.org