For the past 3-6 years, the facilities in graphics programs have improved such that it is simple to create very good looking galleries on the Web. The programs do all the major taks:
1)help gather together the photos into a collection;
2)allow simple resizing and/or watermarking of the images;
3)provide many templates for the basic Web Gallery design;
4)allow customizations in many cases of specific gallery templates for size layout, coloring, etc;
5)do all the lifting work in transferring the images and the final gallery design to the Web including FTP connections and file transfers.
In sum, creating a Web Gallery on the Web is simpler than actually getting a web name and finding the hosting service to support your website. This may be the reason that Social sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Ning have done so well – all offer not just good collaboration capabiilities but also great uploading and creating of your own galleries. Also there at least 2 dozen free (or nearly so) Picture Gallery websites including Flickr and Fotki offer more photo features for the gallery creator. But like the social websites’ galleries, the free community photo galleries do not offer much customization of the look, feel and layout of your gallery on their sites.
The Attraction of Rolling Your Own
So many photo buffs prefer to create their own galleries with their specific look and feel. And so gallery creation tools are very popular; and some of the best can be found in photo editing programs from ACDsee, Adobe, Corel, and many others. We look at 3 tools here and and they reflect our own preferences. Just google “Web Gallery software” to see the full range of software free and for a fee available for creating Web photo galleries. However, these come with the software I use all the time and I have found them to be very robust.
Adobe Photshop Elements 3
For the past 3 years until this summer I clung to using the photogallery software in Photoshop Elements 3. But with my move to Lightroom, Photoshop, PaintShop Pro and Xara photo-editing -Photoshop Elements finally fell to the side. But the Flash-based editor with ability to customize the description, copyrignht, email, and other picture data remained a long favorite. However, the templates available in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom finally changed my preferences.
Lightroom using HTML only
Lightroom offers several different basic viewers and then the choice of look and feel templates for each of those viewers. Users can customize those templates and from that basic start create their own saved templates. These changes and customizations have been expanded in Lightroom 2 so that users have even more options.
Lightroom using Flash
The advantage of Flash is that users have even more special effects and and features at their disposal. Various transitions and fades are available as well as positioning/sizing. Another advantage is that the Flash Player makes it more difficult for viewers to copy your images – they still can using screen capture software tools – but most users do not have such software. Also watermarks and downsizing can discourage such illicit copying.
Summary
Just this small sampler shows the type of Web Galleries users can quickly create. And for many it can be from the convenience of their favorite photo editor. Lightroom makes it especially easy to create a specific collection of images and then transmit in one click to a specific location on your website. I have yet to find a program that is devoted to Photo Gallery Making that offers a choice of Flash or HTML-only galleries with extensive user customization of the display, layout, sizing, and use of thumbnails. However, any readers who have – please add a comment or send a message to the editor.
Finally see the complete galleriesand try them out for performance and ease of use:
The PSEL Photo gallery – note some special Flash capabilities; try dragging the images
The Lightroom HTML gallery – fairly fast and lots of coloring options
The Lightroom Flash gallery – again some neato Flash effects, but slow to load