Gallery

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

Summary 

A Gallery is a collection of photo albums. You can have as many Galleries as you want in your subdomain. Each gallery contains as many photo albums as you want.

Administrator 

You start off with only one user, the Administrator (login name: admin). This account can do anything with Gallery. Typically you'll want to use the admin to create other users. Users can be granted permission to create and maintain their own albums. 

Albums 

An album is a unit group of the Gallery. It can contain pictures and movies. It can have specific permissions (ie, some users can modify it, some users can add to it, etc). The album Administrator is typically the chief maintainer of an album, but the Administrator can grant those permissions to other Gallery users. 

Adding photos to Albums 

If you have the appropriate permissions, you can add photos to an album. You can add them one at a time or up to 10 at a time using the "Add Photos" dialog. If your server has ZIP file support, a faster alternative is to upload a ZIP file full of photos and movies. A third option is to specify a web page and let Gallery go and slurp all the photos and movies off of that page for you (it'll let you pick which ones you want). A fourth option is to copy images to your web server and let Gallery copy them directly into your album. As photos and movies are added to the album, Gallery will resize and make thumbnails of them for you.  Gallery also allows you have albums within albums so you can organize sets of albums together. You can choose which album you want to be the highlight, just as if it were a photo. You can move albums and ranges of photos in and out of other albums. 

Maintaining photos 

A photo or movie is the basic unit of Gallery. Photos and movies are grouped together into albums. Once you have the photos in your album the fun begins. Typically an intermediate resized version and a thumbnail of the image are created for you. You can: 

Add captions 

Edit the thumbnail. Gallery comes with a small Java applet that lets you select a part of the image as the source for your thumbnail. 

Rotate your photo (in 90 degree increments) 

Highlight a photo (pick a photo to represent the album in the main Gallery) 

Reorder the photos in the album 

Hide photos (so that they're only visible to the owner) 

Delete photos 

Sort your album based on popularity, title, number of comments, and photo capture date. 

Edit multiple captions at once 

Maintaining Albums 

Each album's appearance can be customized by its owner in a variety of ways. You can change the title, colors, background, fonts, and borders. You can also specify a target thumbnail size and a target intermediate photo size (so that folks with lesser bandwidth can view scaled versions of big photos). The number of rows and columns in an album is customizable, as well as a variety of viewer options. 

Gallery Remote

Gallery comes with a Java application called Gallery Remote that your users can use to upload photos to your Gallery via a drag-and-drop interface.

Download it here 

Users 

A user (provided the owner allows it) can create a new album. This user (the creator of the album) is the album's owner and can modify the album's permissions. You can grant read, write, modify and delete permissions to individual users on a per-album basis. Owners and the Administrator always have all permissions. 

Customizing Gallery 

You can change much of Gallery's look with style sheets. You can also wrap it inside your own website in a seamless fashion using our HTML wrapping system. The one thing you can't easily do right now is to change the layout from a grid format to something else. However, in v2.0 we plan to introduce a templating system that will let you write your own HTML to do customized themes and layouts (or use the ones that we and other users provide).

Viewer Options.

Users viewing your album can easily navigate around using the navigation bars at the top and bottom of every album page. Each album can be given its own unique URL. Each photo within the album in turn has its own unique URL. You can use these URLs to get directly to a specific photo from outside the Gallery (useful when you want to email photo links to a friend). In addition to this, the album owner can allow the user to use the following features: 

Fit-to-window. 

This feature will scale any photos that don't have intermediate resized versions so that they fit on the screen of the viewer (experimental) This is an optional feature that can be disabled by the Administrator. 

Full-vs-Resized. 

Viewers can specify that they want to view "only" the full sized versions. 

Photo printing. 

Gallery is integrated with Shutterfly. Your viewers can order prints via Shutterfly with a single click. 

Keyword searching. 

Gallery allows you to search your album and photo names and descriptions for keywords. This is a configurable option.

EXIF headers. 

Gallery displays the EXIF data embedded into images by most of the newer digital cameras. This is a configurable option. 

Click counting. 

Gallery tracks how many times an album or photo has been viewed and displays it for you to see. This is an optional feature that can be disabled by the Administrator. 

Public commenting. 

Visitors can write their own comments on individual photos for all to see. Admins can manage these comments. This is an optional feature that can be disabled by the Administrator.

Slideshow. 

Visitors can view the contents of an album using a slideshow. 

Windows XP Publishing Wizard.

This comes standard with every Gallery installation. All you have to do is point your web browser to http://your.host.com/gallery/publish_xp_docs.php and follow the instructions.  As the name implies, this only works on Windows XP. The advantage is a very close integration with the OS, which means very non-technical users will probably have an easier time with this than with other more complex tools.