Digital Home Thoughts: Gallery - Your Photos on Your Website

There are many ways to get your photos up on the internet. You can use products such as Adobe Photoshop Album or Picasa to create HTML pages you can upload to your site. You can go with a hosting service such as Mac.com or TypePad. But what if you want to get beyond just simple HTML and allow comments, voting and allow people to upload their own images to your album? Well a great solution I use is Gallery. Gallery is an open source solution so it will cost you nothing, but does mean you'll need to install it yourself. Gallery requires PHP 4 and Apache Web server (people have gotten it to run on IIS, but it is really difficult). Gallery is used by many people and it seems to be the photo gallery of choice for Presidential Candidates (John Kerry, Howard Dean, RNC and other) wanting to showcase "kissing the babies".

As for features, there are more than I can list, check them out here. The ability to handle comments, polling, EXIF Headers, printing and other functions make Gallery a great choice if you wantto share your photos and movies with friends. I use it to share pictures of my son with our family all over the world. Gallery allows uploading of ZIP, movie files, digital photos and other formats, as well as being able to watermark your images. With the standard Java interface, you can drag and drop your images for quick uploading. The administration tools allow you to restrict the albums and edit how they will be viewed. Also there is a big community of users who have created skins and other "plug-ins" to allow customization of your Gallery.

The best way to learn more about Gallery is play with it. There are hundreds of examples on their website. I tried many different options before deciding on Gallery and I'm glad I picked it. They are quick to release bug fixes and are working on a new Version 2.0 which promises to be even better.