Galleries

Two — or all three — of the following can be combined in one site, letting you choose the “right tool for the job” when you publish your photos.

Important: if you don’t care to update your site once it’s done, or would like us at S4P to take care of updates for you, don’t worry about any of this hard/easy/learning curve stuff. Just choose a gallery that looks best to you.

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Gallery2

  • software cost: free!
  • basic installation & configuration: $399
  • ease of use: fairly easy to use
  • simplicity: low
  • learning curve: fairly steep
  • features & options: tons
  • powerful: very
  • example of Gallery2

Matt’s comments:

Broad but powerful. Very extensible, powerful gallery application for both advanced hobbyists and pro’s. Has slideshows, multiple users, comments, photo ratings, and dozens of other photo-specific features. All you have to do is use the control panel to upload photos, or use the Windows upload client. You may batch upload if you care to. If you want to take advantage of the advanced features, be prepared to take time to learn the various administration settings.

Shopping carts can be integrated into Gallery2.

Summary:

You don’t have to be a coder or touch code at all, at any level. You can simply start uploading images and they will look fantastic. If you want to take advantage of the advanced features, you’ll need to spend some time getting familiar with the administration interface. Or you can forget the advanced stuff and your photos will look great.

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SimpleViewer

Matt’s comments:

Best looking slideshow ever. Uses Flash. Once you get used to it, it’s simple to update your photos if you have a rudimentary knowledge of FTP and can create and rename folders on your host account. It’s “stupid easy” for your users, and has a high “Wow” factor. Not for users on dialup, or you if you’re on dialup. If you don’t care about updating your images often — you just want a great looking slideshow to show off your images — this is it.

Summary:

We recommend SimpleViewer if you want to showcase photos and

  • don’t want the viewer to be distracted by anything else on the screen
  • don’t need bells and whistles
  • want the best-looking slideshow out there

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WordPress

  • software cost: free!
  • basic installation & configuration: $299
  • ease of use: easy to use
  • simplicity: medium
  • learning curve: low-moderate
  • features & options: tons
  • powerful: very
  • WordPress example

Matt’s comments:

WordPress blog software is not really photo-specific, but can easily be used to show your images online. Incredibly flexible, incredibly extensible. It’s got outstanding anti-spam tools built in, as well as wonderful comments system and very good out-of-the-box search engine optimization characteristics. That means people will be able to find you on Google easier.

Your Flickr gallery can be integrated into WordPress. Shopping carts can be “snapped in”, as can almost any features you can find on the Web.

Summary:

I use WordPress as my container for all my Web sites. I then add content and features (including SimpleViewer and Gallery2) inside it as necessary. It’s a great foundation for any site, photography or not.

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Advanced training, custom themes, non-standard features, hosting and domain names are additional.

Important: once again, if you don’t care to update your site once it’s done, or would like us at S4P to take care of updates for you, don’t worry about any of this hard/easy/learning curve stuff. Just choose a gallery that looks best to you, or tell us what you need and we’ll give you solutions to choose from.