Once you start using a digital camera, you won’t go back to film. The advantage over film is that you can take as many pictures as you want and not worry about the cost. Digital photos are also easier to share than film. All that you have to do is e-mail the pictures to your friends. The problem is that you may have thousands of photos and it’s too much to work selecting photos for sharing.
An online photo gallery would solve this problem. I’ve examined many PHP gallery applications and found that the Menalto Gallery was the best solution. The proper name of the program is just Gallery, which isn’t very descriptive.
The gallery integrates with many client applications in Windows and Macintosh, such as Google’s Picasa. You can upload to your gallery directly from these clients, but I prefer uploading all my photos by FTP to the gallery and posting the photos in the appropriate albums.
This application is loaded with features, and it has a plug-in architecture with many useful utilities that can be installed. You can set permissions for albums so that, for example, only family members may see certain photos.
Another useful feature is the ability to download entire albums in a Zip file. This is a great way to share photos with family and friends.
I’ve placed photos of Vancouver, Victoria (the nicest city in B.C.), and surrounding cities on gallery.cyprich.com if you would like to see what Gallery is capable of. Keep in mind that I’m not a professional photographer. 🙂
I would also like to upload my pics via ftp. Where exactly do I put them in the jungle that is the gallery directory?
You need to install the Add Items plugin to import photos from a folder accessible by FTP on your gallery’s site. Then go to Web/Server in Import in the Admin Options and add a path where you will be uploading photos for your gallery. If your on a Linux host and are not sure of the full path of your upload folder, type pwd from within this folder in a command shell.
To upload photos, exit the Site Admin section and go to the album where you want to add the photos. Press Add Items from the Options menu. Click on the From Local Server tab, click on the Server Path, and click on the Find Files button.
Then select which folder you want to upload to your gallery.