Hi all,

I'm planning on putting my best images up on an personal website registered to me.

So, I'm writing the forum to ask for suggestions regarding gallery formats. Here are several professional galleries, or gallery demos, that I very much like:


Darlene Almeda : Photoscapes.com

Great photos. Re the gallery, it is a nice layout; I like how it is integrated with ordering prints, if you just click on a thumbnail. I also like that you can direct-link to the larger photo's page. However, one thing that I don't like is how there is no photo link. You cannot link directly to the photo. This was probably a conscious decision, but it has the effect of de-google-izing your photo. Consider the photo, "Awakening". Try Googling it, even restricting the Google to http://photoscapes.com. Nothing shows up. In fact, Googling for images on photoscapes.com produces only 2 results. But there are probably 100 photos on the site!

I of course understand the desire to protect your work from external linking without permission. But the photographer name is watermarked on he lower right hand portion. So at least if it was linked to, there'd be a copyright notice. So maybe it makes it more difficult to link to, but still not impossible; a determined person could just copy the image and host it themselves, even crop out the watermark. (I wonder if it might be a good idea, for legal purposes, to create several "invisible" diagonal watermarks with your name and copyright for images on a site; i.e., with a 1/255 difference in darkness. Invisible to the naked eye (most of them), but provable.


Jeremy Cowart Photography

I like the way the gallery is, how you can slide from one image to the next, and how images are large. But it's in Flash. Flash is awful, imo. And nothing on the webpage resizes to my attempts to enlarge text. I'm not an old man, but I like to have my text large. Also, the website is completely unusable if I shrink my browser down to 3 x 3 inches. I do however like the option to pull up a thumnail list.

Navigating the images is a little slow compared to the galleries above and below, though.


MooFlow Gallery

This is just a demo gallery. But imo, it's a "wow". Look how fast you can scroll through the images with cover-flow style; using either arrow keys, scroll-wheel, or mouse clicks. Double-clicking on the image brings up a larger version. Also checkout he "fullsize viewer" (click on "Another Gallery" to get something more interesting than Apple logos). You can click a button to maximize the gallery to your display, and then click on the little magnifying glass buttons to get larger images.

It also links to direct images; although google search of the site for images produces no result, for some reason.

I really like the presentation of images on that gallery, if only for the speed with which you can navigate through it. Although I prefer the larger image presentation of Cowarts site. I presume that can be changed by a few simple settings. More complicated is if this image gallery javascript can be integrated with ordering prints, as is Darlene's gallery. Not just technically, but also from a "does it make sense to the user" pov.

Thoughts?