Hi

I'm hoping to improve my online galleries at some point. I used to use Simpleviewer, which was great when I had very few pictures, and worked out of Picasa.

Now I use JAlbum with a slightly customised Bananalbum skin, but it's still a bit too slow and naff for other people to use. I'm sure my host (Dreamhost) is part of the speed problem, and that can't be helped... I also use another skin for the video gallery, which is okay, but not great either. Is there also a better way of managing galleries of videos? I won't ask what good video/audio codecs to use, because that's a forum worth of discussion in itself!

Do people here run large galleries (e.g. 20 or 30 sections with up to 700 photos in each one)? Is there a free (or very cheap) solution, that also have clever stuff like slideshows, watermarking etc. Preferably one that works with JAlbum or Picasa, though I could change if it's that much better

It's really annoying - you'd think the net would be overrun by cheap/free decent album generators, but it seems not.

I havn't the faintest idea what you're on about TC, so i'm sorry for this off-topic post.

But i've got to ask..

Quote from tristancliffe :

a slightly customised Bananalbum skin,

Ban-anal-bum skin ??



Feel free to ignore me, but, it made me laugh..

Try Gallery or Coppermine. Both are best of personal online galleries, with loads of features.

Or you could even use a Flickr photostream port and run that through to your website, which is also another popular of way of showing photos.

For the uninformed - a simpleviewer gallery looks like this - http://jakg.com/Fire/

On topic - i use Adobe Lightroom (VERY cheap - got mine free legally) for Jakg.com. No idea if it's any good, though.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Hi

I'm hoping to improve my online galleries at some point. I used to use Simpleviewer, which was great when I had very few pictures, and worked out of Picasa.

Now I use JAlbum with a slightly customised Bananalbum skin, but it's still a bit too slow and naff for other people to use. I'm sure my host (Dreamhost) is part of the speed problem, and that can't be helped... I also use another skin for the video gallery, which is okay, but not great either. Is there also a better way of managing galleries of videos? I won't ask what good video/audio codecs to use, because that's a forum worth of discussion in itself!

Do people here run large galleries (e.g. 20 or 30 sections with up to 700 photos in each one)? Is there a free (or very cheap) solution, that also have clever stuff like slideshows, watermarking etc. Preferably one that works with JAlbum or Picasa, though I could change if it's that much better

I second tweak's suggestions.. couple of nice web-based albums (will need to upload the pics into them rather than using a standalone app to generate thye gallery in its entirety etc).

Quote :

It's really annoying - you'd think the net would be overrun by cheap/free decent album generators, but it seems not.

I did start working on one (image manager / gallery builder) but recently had to rebuild my windoze install and not got around to reinstalling my C++ IDE / components. Maybe I'll get around to finishing it soon



Regards,

Ian

I use coppermine personally, very easy to set up, and a lot of nice admin tools.

http://www.piclens.com/lite/

Coppermine and Gallery are crap in my opinion. Takes ages to upload the images, then you have to slowly go through and set up everything. In the time it took me to do one folder in Gallery I'd done the entire gallery AND uploaded it AND it looked better AND it's still quicker than the tedious monotony of Gallery.

Piclens looks nice, but I can't quite work out what it is! Is it a Firefox extension, or a local image organiser than will generate an html album, or what? The website is pretty crap and tells you nothing you need to know.

piclens makes amazing graphics, but its more of something that you might make a site compatible with (ie a piclens compatible gallery) than a solution as it requires the Piclens extension for Firefox installed.

Actually I had no idea how it works, just discovered the extension a few days ago and I remembered it reading this topic... I posted for if you find it useful for your purposes

If everyone had it (and it had more options, specifically about Caching) it would rock, but 99% of Internet users will never of used it.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Coppermine and Gallery are crap in my opinion. Takes ages to upload the images, then you have to slowly go through and set up everything. In the time it took me to do one folder in Gallery I'd done the entire gallery AND uploaded it AND it looked better AND it's still quicker than the tedious monotony of Gallery.

Piclens looks nice, but I can't quite work out what it is! Is it a Firefox extension, or a local image organiser than will generate an html album, or what? The website is pretty crap and tells you nothing you need to know.

I've heard zenphoto was nice lightweight and quick, I've yet to try it though.

I also use dreamhost, but I dont really have any problems with the quickness of uploading images in Gallery. I just personally hate it. Coppermine is alright, buts much better when its buried in something else and not a main function.

Flickr and some integration with your site perhaps?

Quote from MattxMosh :

Coppermine is alright, buts much better when its buried in something else and not a main function.

That's exactly how I'm using it, integrated with a portal...blends in great!

i used this little tutorial to make a lightbox gallery with photoshop, that you would then upload to your site. http://www.photoshoplab.com/li ... 20-web-photo-gallery.html

here's my example of using it. nice and easy as far as i'm concerned.
http://burnsy.no-ip.info/albums/

I use and quite like Smugmug but I don't think that's quite what you're after.

Example gallery: http://deadwolfbones.smugmug.com/gallery/3617353_oZS2N

The greatest problem I find with these flash gallery things is they're cumbersome to use and often don't let you download full res images. Have you considered a rather boring looking photo album like Picasa that I find are far easier to find the photos you want to look at in a large collection of pictures. Maybe you could do a small selection with something like simpleviewer that looks swish embedded in the site and have a link to an external gallery for the bulk of the pictures.

Tristan please no watermarks, they just make the photos horrible to look at, if you want to be credited for them put something in the corner but just slapping a great big watermark rather ruins the actual content of the photo.

The trouble is that Andrew wants to sell them, so I've agreed to put watermarks on them to discourage too much stealing, whilst still being allowed to have his photos on my site. Put the watermarks out of the way and it ceases to be a useful deterrent. If you want to buy them visit www.norwichphoto.co.uk/mono2008/r1 or www.norwichphoto.co.uk/mono2008/r2 (but of course, who would want to buy random photos of racing cars - the links are meant for competitors to buy pictures of themselves - and it works).


At least the images load quickly now, so browsing is less of a pain than it was before.

They're very reasonably priced and have the watermark in a much better location

Do you think you could slip those pictures of my Dad onto the end of an album somewhere so we can order a couple of prints?

I'll tell Andrew tomorrow and see what we can arrange. There may be more of him, as Andrew has a habit of taking pictures of anything that moves (and some that don't) at race meetings.

Edit: And I may move the watermark a bit. But not too much, otherwise people will just pinch images for free from me (even if they aren't anywhere near full resolution or suitable for printing nicely).