Hands on: DIY galleries

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.