Next Generation Photo Gallery Web Apps?

[Frank Petronio]

Lately I've enjoyed using some of the online galleries that allow you to upload, caption, and delete images from a browser interface. You can add and delete folders/albums and set thumbnails for the album covers. Their best feature is the ability to rearrange the sequence of photos. Myspace does this, as do some of the model portfolio sites and others. Myspace is rather crude but it works fine. Model Mayhem has a decent functionality, and I am sure there are many other sites doing this as well.

Is there anything like this off-the-shelf and customizable for individuals? I imagine this would be big job to build from scratch.

And yeah, I would want it to be standards compliant and all that jazz.

One other thing is that I think most of these apps run your jpgs through a resizing and sharpening process. Is there anyway to circument that? I prefer to resize and sharpen my images on a case by case basis, but I wouldn't mind it being available for when I want to upload a batch.

Obviously I am looking to redo my stale online galleries... thanks

[Nate Battles]

Have you tried Adobe Photoshop Lightroom? You can download a trial version. I've never used it, but I hear good things.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/

[paulr]

have you checked out jalbum.com? it comes with a lot of "skins," all of which are customizeable. you can configure it to leave your images alone.

and it's free. someone here recommended it a while ago.

[Frank Petronio]

ahh I really would like something that validates and is clean...

[QT Luong]

Pick any open source package that provides the functionality you want, then pick one standard, and have a coder from a third-world country make it compliant and identical looking to your own existing web galleries.

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

Good luck finding a programmer that'll help you make it work. There are a HUGE amount of dis-honest sharks out there in the web programming world that will take your money and run. Be very careful, learn the language yourself or have a close friend help you... I will never, EVER recommend hiring someone completely foreign.

[Shen45]

Is that foreign as in not American or is it just a totally prejudiced remark that anyone not Red, White and Blue is a crook.

----------
A non American

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

Is that foreign as in not American or is it just a totally prejudiced remark that anyone not Red, White and Blue is a crook.

----------
A non American

Uh, it means someone who you're not close to and don't know. As in American, European, anything ending with "an" and whatever other country you can find. It has nothing to do with nationality. I'm just speaking from experience how, for a website that I was supposed to have launched in August, is now probably not going to be 100% fully up until next week, two and a half months late and four programmers and one very nasty letter from lawyer to programmer #3 later. I was on a programming board just the other day and they were saying how many people out there are running scams and just take your money if you're not exorbinantly cautious. I'm definitely not the only one who's been screwed.

[QT Luong]

Well, like everywhere, you have to know what you are doing (in this case how to outsource). For instance, if you use a system like rentacoder.com, the money is not released until you have approved the work. There is also a systems of ratings, penalties, and arbitration that does carry some weight. I have been very pleased with all the coders I have hired there for various projects.

[Gordon Moat]

Many professional photographers use LiveBooks (http://www.livebooks.com). Definitely not cheap, though I have read many favorable reviews.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio

[timparkin]

Hi Frank.

I'm working on a photo gallery system at the moment and I'd be interested in knowing what functionality you would like to see in a system (accessible, standards compliant, css layout being a given).

[Rob Champagne]

Good luck finding a programmer that'll help you make it work. There are a HUGE amount of dis-honest sharks out there in the web programming world that will take your money and run. Be very careful, learn the language yourself or have a close friend help you... I will never, EVER recommend hiring someone completely foreign.

Thanks for the tip. I won't be doing any business with you either :D :D :D

I hope you've advised the US govt to shut down all international trade. Talk about small minded bigotry.

[Rob Champagne]

are you looking to embed this in one of your current sites or would it be a standalone site?

If you are on a shared hosting server, the concept of batch processing say 100 uploaded images is going to make you unpopular since it will consume large amounts of cpu for a long time. Infact most shared hosting servers will timeout before your script has processed all the resizes and generation of thumbnails. You would have to check with your host as to whether thats a realistic request to make.

[Rob Champagne]

www.lightboxphoto.com

may be worth looking at since they have recently made it xhtml transitional compliant. Request the admin demo from them.

[Frank Petronio]

On my latest web update I just kept with static pages and figure the discipline of manually updating my portfolios will keep me from putting mediocre images up....

I try to optimize my jpgs by sharpening very carefully for the screen, so I rather not have the web app do any resizing.

I really like the new ways some sites like myspace allow you to re-order and edit captions of the uploaded images... I haven't seen that available off the shelf yet. Actually the myspace model works very well, it is one of the only nice looking parts of myspace I think. If you could do galleries of 20, 40, 60, that would be all you need.

[Rob Champagne]

I thought your sites were based on custom movabletype templates. Have you looked at the current MT photo plugins?

[Frank Petronio]

only the blog part so far...

[Rob Champagne]

both MT and wordpress have plugins for viewing flickr images but I have no idea about the sorting options. Really depends on your brief for viewing functionality combined with text etc etc etc.

[David Spivak-Focus Magazine]

Thanks for the tip. I won't be doing any business with you either :D :D :D

I hope you've advised the US govt to shut down all international trade. Talk about small minded bigotry.


Is that foreign as in not American or is it just a totally prejudiced remark that anyone not Red, White and Blue is a crook.
---------- A non American


Uh, it means someone who you're not close to and don't know. As in American, European, anything ending with "an" and whatever other country you can find. It has nothing to do with nationality. I'm just speaking from experience how, for a website that I was supposed to have launched in August, is now probably not going to be 100% fully up until next week, two and a half months late and four programmers and one very nasty letter from lawyer to programmer #3 later. I was on a programming board just the other day and they were saying how many people out there are running scams and just take your money if you're not exorbinantly cautious. I'm definitely not the only one who's been screwed.

Some people never bother to read.

[jgunderson]

Frank take a look at Gallery 2 (http://gallery.menalto.com/). I've used their open source software for years and have been very pleased with it. There are quite a few plugins for it as well that allow you to organize and upload directly out of Aperture/iPhoto/etc. if that's your thing...

[Photomax]

Take a look at the Wordpress boards. There are user add-ons and gallery scripts that many find worthwhile. A lot of people look for different things so one size does not fit all. In general I find that the better web technologies suffer from their own popularity: the look and interface becomes so "seen that everywhere..." I still like to build it by hand...

But to be honest Frank: I thought you had the skills and skepticism of such user tricks that you would want to do it on your own?

[Rob Champagne]

Another one is EE which is now xhtml strict so templates can be written in pure css I think. This is a very powerful and totally free gallery package. Designed with digital capture in mind but you can switch all that crap off. Very configurable and I see there is a new snippets option for embedding stuff in pages outside of EE which may be useful. Also has FTP uploads available making upload of many images much quicker.

http://photography-on-the.net/ee/

This guy has always been very helpful for people using his software and takes note of requests for new funtionality. See forums:

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=93

[Photomax]

I think a large part of whether to decide to use one of these systems or not is the volume of photos you are dealing with. If you a shooter that needs to put a bunch of images quickly then these systems are great. Wedding photographers who want to sell images to other folks beside the bride etc.

On the other hand if you are presenting a small amount of images as a portfolio then there are cleaner methods of presenting you work without scripts, extra code or file size. Some script/Flash solutions require that the images be the same size and shape as well.

Frank, if you are into Web Standards I would still look into building a thumbnail and slide show platform with regular HTML. Using ID's and Classes you can create a very cool looking presentation that would accommodate shapes, captions, borders, rollovers, backgrounds etc. But if you want to be able to work with volumes of images then this interesting thread looks like it could yield a good solution for you...

[Rob Champagne]

two other simple options for embedding in your current site:

first is simple viewer which is flash. you just set up an xml feed which is really easy.
its easy to set up mini galleries for each shoot or project. This saves a great deal of time as image navigation is taken care of. Sort order is cotrolled by order of entries in xml file which you can edit. You can chose whether to let it resize or do that yourself before uploading images. Suitable for small volumes of images in each gallery.
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/

This one is a dreamweaver extension and looks good to me. Again its really simple to implement if you have dreamweaver and image navigation is taken care of via javascript. You have control over sort order and whether you allow it to resize or not.
Again you should be able to setup mini galleries for each shoot or project and embed into your current site.
http://www.projectseven.com/viewer/index.asp?demo=igm