My New Gallery (2007-07-03)

2007-07-03

I've built several web galleries over the past 10 years, mostly private ones for my family and friends. None of them were intended to really show off my best images, in the sense that a fine-art photographer has a "gallery."

A while back I even developed a free gallery-maker called Albumatic, whose outstanding feature was its ability to automatically build galleries of hundreds or even thousands of images. It only ran on Windows and, while it's still available to download, helping users set it up for FTP was too much of a support burden. Mostly for that reason I never charged for Albumatic, although I got an occasional donation. A few years ago I stopped supporting it.

Besides, with increased bandwidth, people were using free or inexpensive photo-sharing sites for their web galleries. A Windows app that required you to manage your own web site was no longer the best way to go for the average photographer, although it does have its advantages (read on).

Lately I've started to use Smugmug to host galleries for my family and friends, because it stores large image files as a backup, the navigation is pretty good, and people can order their own prints without my having to do it for them. I especially like the new sharegroups that allow me to have different collections of galleries for different groups of people.

But Smugmug didn't seem appropriate for what I'll call my "attempted fine-art" photos. Too cluttered and too many display options. And I wanted a button that would bring up a Google map if the photo is geotagged. (See my blog archives for some recent writing on that subject.) The galleries from Lightroom looked great—exactly the subdued elegance that I wanted—but it wasn't clear that I could customize them to do what I wanted, although I did hack around on that for a while.

There are at least three ways to build a web gallery:

1. Prepare all the images and HTML pages in advance, customized for each individual gallery, and upload them. (Each image gets its own HTML file.)
2. Use a closed technology like Adobe Flash. A variation on #1.
3. Write a general gallery application that runs on the server.

#1 is fine if you have the app, but I had already done essentially that with Albumatic and I knew all too well how much of a hassle it would be, even if I never distributed the new program to anyone else. I don't have time to build a full-blown gallery app, anyway. I didn't want to use Flash (#2) because it doesn't run on many browsers. (Including the iPhone browser, released only last week.)

Doing the gallery building on the server sounded easy enough, as I had already found a hosting company whose PHP included EXIF support, which I would need to pull metadata out of the images.

Part of the job always has to be done on the client: Uploading the photos to the server. For that, I use Lightroom's Web module, even though I'm not using Lightroom's galleries. Lightroom builds the assets (thumbnails and large images) and uploads them, but my own server program displays the gallery. The HTML generated by Lightroom is uploaded, but it's never used.

It all works very well. The program on the server doesn't change; it figures out what galleries and what images exist when it runs. All I have to do is use Lightroom to build and upload a new gallery, and then it automatically appears on my site. You can see what I've done by clicking the "Galleries" cloud at the top of this page. (There's no way to order prints. I am so far behind in learning to print.)

Let me know if you like any of my images. After all, the gallery technology isn't the main thing, right?