Hands on: DIY galleries

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.