How to Create a Photo Gallery Website
From LoveToKnow Web-Design
One of the first experiences of any person on the Internet is learning how to make a photo gallery website. Even though it was intended for words and data, the multimedia potential of the web has led it to become a place for personal expression as well as a repository for the memories of life.
Basic Elements
There are many different ways to create web photo galleries, but all have a few common elements.
- Home page identifying what the gallery is about and who created it
- Navigation menu showing various categories of pictures in the gallery
- Thumbnail images small previews showing all or parts of the larger images
- Images that may be one or several sizes to facilitate varying bandwidth speeds
Not all galleries will have all of these elements. For example, a gallery may not have various categories, especially at first. However, as galleries grow in size it is a good idea to begin to divide the pictures up. Even if a web photo album is all about one subject, such as "Darby the Goldfish," usually there are one or more ways to divide up the pictures:
- Darby the Goldfish
- Darby in the Bowl
- Darby Sleeping
- Darby and the Little Plastic Scuba Guy
- Darby's Lovely Eyes
Another way to categorize images is with "tags", which are simply words that apply to the content of a photo. For example, all of the photos in Darby's web gallery would have "fish" in common, but some would have "eyes" included, others "bowl", others "scuba guy". The advantage of using tags is that pictures can have more than one tag associated with them (for example, a photo of Darby looking at the scuba guy would include "eyes, scuba guy" as tags). Using basic data functions galleries can then be created dynamically based on the categories of what people want to see. Stock photo houses such as iStockPhoto and PicApp store their millions of images and make them readily available using this method.
How to Make a Photo Gallery Website
So you've got the photos on your camera, hard drive, or in a shoebox ready to be scanned. You want to get them online quickly and easily, so that Grandma and Uncle Morton can see the magnificence that is your goldfish Darby. It would be nice if there were simply one clear and easy way to put it up, but the bad news is that there are many choices, and the best is determined by your own needs. The good news is that almost all of them are very easy.
Going in order from the easiest to the hardest, here are several examples of how to make a photo gallery website of your very own:
Flickr
One of the more popular sites on the web is Flickr, and the main reason is that it's incredibly simple. Once you establish an account (which is free) you can upload as many as 200 photos right away. Flickr not only takes care of the technical side of creating thumbnails and multiple image sizes, it also lets you easily tag your photos and arrange them into sub-galleries.
Even better are the social networking aspects of Flickr. The tags you choose for your pictures are not only used for your own photos - they are also included in the vast pool of photos uploaded by other users, so that you can also see other goldfish afficionados and share your photos with them.
Flickr is not the only site]] to allow these kinds of photo sharing. It's simply the most popular. Many other sites have followed suit, offering similar services including the ability to easily order and sell prints of your work.
Picasa, iPhoto and Personal Applications
Perhaps you would like your Darby the Magnificent Goldfish library to be more private. Most new computers these days include some sort of image software, such as Apple's iPhoto. If you need a Microsoft option, Google also offers a similar application called Picasa, and usually digital cameras from reputable manufacturers such as Sony or HP will also offer software with the cameras.
iPhoto and Picasa are by far the most user friendly and best supported applications. Each of them will sense when your camera is connected, easily download the images to your computer, and then offer several options for processing them. These include tagging, moving them into galleries on your computer (not on the web) and re-sizing them. They usually offer a clear interface for viewing the pictures, moving them around, and deleting or adding to them using simple drag and drop functions.
Once your photos are exactly the way you want them, you can then export them to email, to a folder on your computer, or to a website of your own. iPhoto would rather you used a .Mac account to show your images, but Picasa will let you use a free online service from Google. Neither of these have as much social networking functionality of Flickr, but the galleries are on the web and will be easy to share simply by sending the URL to whomever you'd like to share it with.
Rolling Your Own
The most difficult way to create a web photo gallery is to create your own directory for manipulating and showing the pictures. Many image and web design applications such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver have automated gallery creation functions. These will create the HTML code to show the thumbnails and links to larger images as well as basic navigation functions, but require a fairly extensive knowledge of HTML and the structure of web design.
There are also open-source applications such as Gallery 2 that can be installed on your server, but these require system administration and database creation using MySQL and other more complex web applications. While these options are more difficult to implement than something like Flickr, they are ideal if you want complete control of your presentation, interface, and terms of service.
With this many options, it is no wonder that galleries filled with pictures of everything from landscapes to Darby the Goldfish populate the web. It only remains for you to decide how to decorate your own particular corner of the internet, sharing the photos from your life.
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This page has been accessed 2,305 times. This page was last modified 05:04, 3 April 2008.
© 2006-2009 LoveToKnow Corp.
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