Photo Gallery Freeware

[paulr]

A friend of mine who is a code whiz offered to rebuild my old website based on my new design. But he's in no hurry, so I was forced to put up a temporary site. It's basically a facade ... a redesigned home page that acts as a portal to either my clunky old site or some downloadable PDF portfolios.

I'd love to add some gallery functionality to it. I've decided to give up in advance on learning how to write dynamic code. But I'm wondering if there are any good freeware photo gallery programs available for download. I've found a bunch through google, but it's all hideously ugly--busy, feature ladden, badly designed. The tools make your portfolios look like a low-budget e-commerce site!

I'm looking for something very simple, elegant, and customizeable. Ideally something where I could design the buttons, and have the whole thing show up as an Include in a page that I've designed.

Whatever it is would have to run on a unix server.

Any ideas?

[robc]

First, what tools do you have available? Do you have dreamweaver? Second, on your unix server what web softare are you running. i.e. Apache(web server), PHP(server side scripting language) and MySQL(SQL server software). Or do you have something else such as ASP(server side scripting) MS SQL(SQL server software).

Basically you need to know this to know which free software will run on your web server.

I can point you to loads of freebies but to "Customize" them you either go with one of the pre-defined templates or you need to know PHP, CSS and some development tool such as dreamweaver, so exactly what are you prepared to do yourself.

The following is a cheap addon for dreamweaver which makes it very simple to generate an "in page" web gallery from your local pc providing you have dreamweaver.

http://www.projectseven.com/products/galleries/hgmagic/insert.htm

click home to see full details of the product. The above link is the "in page" example. You should be able to change the colour scheme using only css and maybe a few image edits.

For totally free I would have a look at Coppermine (http://coppermine-gallery.net/demo/cpg13x/index.php?theme=hardwired) and view the "hardwired" theme template. This one is not so easy to customize but there are a lot of options for configuration.

then there is :

http://gallery.menalto.com/

http://jalbum.net/samples.jsp

and if you just want temporary then PS will generate a simple gallery for you, which you can edit to suit.

But if you want something on a web server where you have to log in and upload images then Gallery or Coppermine above are two of the most popular.

[paulr]

thanks, robc, i'll check those out.

i have dreamweaver, and find it to be a disaster. but i can get some things done with it, given enough time and alcohol.

my server runs pretty up to date mysqul, php, apache, etc.. i'd have to check to know what versions.

thanks again.

[robc]

thanks, robc, i'll check those out.

i have dreamweaver, and find it to be a disaster. but i can get some things done with it, given enough time and alcohol.

my server runs pretty up to date mysqul, php, apache, etc.. i'd have to check to know what versions.

thanks again.

Recent versions of PHP4 and MySQL should be fine for all those I suggested.

The projectseven dreamweaver extension doesn't require any special server software as far as I know. Its javascript driven at the client end. If you are running PHP5 then most freebies using PHP won't work with the possible exception of Gallery from menalto.

[Bobf]

There is a simple but quite elegant Flash based freeware gallery here: http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/

Cheers, Bob.

[robc]

just came across an example of using "Gallery" from menalto as an embedded gallery in an existing website:

http://www.onestopdesigns.co.uk/logo/gallery2/main.php

http://gallery.menalto.com/

it does take a little knowledge of css to get it configured to work as an embedded gallery.

[paulr]

I'm impressed by the JAlbum software. One of the included skins is close to what i want, and there's an online forum where help is availble for code virgins like me who want to customize them.

Thanks again for the tip, robc