Make Your Own Gallery Site

With so many good online photo gallery websites available, why bother to roll your own? You have to get some web space and a domain name which together will cost $60-100 per year. Plus add in the “pleasure” of installing and maintaining your own gallery – who wants the grief ? Besides some great gallery websites like Flickr.com, Fotki.com , and Photobucket. com just to name a few have very generous free offerings. And photo edit programs Aperture, Lightroom, and Photoshop will generate great gallery sites and allow you to upload to your own website or some 3rd party web gallery hosters. So why fiddle ?

Your Gallery Website

Well if my concentrated dissuasion did not work – then all I can do is try to lead you to some very good and free software for establishing your own website gallery. Here are two simple but effective free website gallerys that are fairly easy to install, easy to maintain, and each have some added and unique extras.

Minishowcase

Minishowcase is a gallery creation program that is small, fast(except for IE browser which hiccups unexpectedly) and very simple to install and operate. Minishowcase does not use a database – so no hassles there.

Instead, Minishowcase has users load files to directories and the program then treats those directories as albums. Hence users can have multiple albums with titling for both albums, thumbnails, and fullscale photos. Its really barebones but also quite logical.

In fact Minishowcase, which handles creation also allows the user to choose a display size which may be smaller or larger than the original. The result is that adding, deleting, and creating new images in a gallery is trivial to do for anyone with FTP experience (use free Filezilla here for simple file uploads and downloads).

In addition, Minishowcase has a free plugin to manage your gallery files if you want to do it that way. In sum, Minishowcase is testament to less is more.

ZenPhoto.org

Zenphoto is a gallery site that uses PHP and MySQL database but you would hardly know it. You upload a zip file of images or a directory or individual images and Zenphoto takes care of getting the image thumbnailed and displayed according to your directions. It is easy to add comments, classify the images by category/tag, and display in sub-albums as desired. You can control commenting and contributors privileges. And the next version will have simple drag and drop re-ordering of images in an album.

But the two features I like best about ZenPhoto are the multiple themes or website stylings that are available and the WordPress plugins. Users with some CSS and php-savvy can modify or even create their own display themes – but there is already a library of nearly two dozen and growing. And these themes are fairly easy to customize for color and simple layout. Finally, the ability to use Zenphoto through a WordPress plugin is attractive to this user (this blog, Picture That, uses WordPress) and potentially thousands of other users. So check the Zen out.