I’m wondering how other webmasters have created photo galleries for their websites. Currently I have a gallery using a basic Flash template, but I’m looking for something better. I’d like to find something that creates thumbnails but also has a slideshow feature. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I (www.team1065.com), and along with 1523 (www.marsbot.org) use Gallery2. I actually learned about it from their web-person (old webmaster). I’m not sure if it has a slide show feature I haven’t really played around with it, but it has automatic thumbnails and you can upload straight from Windows Explorer.
You can learn about it on: http://gallery.menalto.com
Edit: 1523 says it does have slide show
Team 1065: http://www.team1065.com/gallery2/main.php
Team 1523: http://www.marsbot.org/gallery
I didn’t know I was all of “1523”, but Gallery 2 is super slick, and easy to use like Mich said. Several members of the team have photo upload access and it takes some of the load off the web team.
If you choose to install it, I highly recommend using the Pre-Installer. It’s loads faster and easy to use, guiding you step by step through the Gallery install process.
Here is a screenshot of the slideshow feature: View slideshow | Gallery
I use a combination of jAlbum and Banana Album creator for my picture slideshows on rhodewarrior.org
I’m not sure whether I’d be able to use Gallery. I don’t have direct access to our school’s server, where our site is hosted. I just have the ability to upload files to a location on the server, rather our teacher does. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Gallery looks really cool, though.
Odds are you won’t be able to install that on the schools server, but there are other options that you can do if you really want to be able to use the gallery, and other nice features that may be prohibited on a school server;
If you can afford it you can get hosting through Sevaa, they provide FREE hosting to FIRST teams, all you have to do is purchase a domain from them. I personally own my teams domain, and I plan to continue to own it until the team diminishes, as a “gift” to the team.
You can read more about Sevaa for FIRST here.
If you have any questions about website development and design, feel free to send me a PM, or an IM (with an introduction as to who you are) and I’ll be glad to help you.
I’ve used Gallery2 and miniGal in the past (both of which are great), but when I was beginning to redesign the Team 228 website for the 2007 season I couldn’t find any existing PHP/MySQL software to do what I want, so I wrote my own. Basically I wanted to convert some of the best features from Gallery2 and CD-Media into one package, and so far here’s the result:
www.team228.org/media/pictures/
Currently, the software I wrote:
- Splits all the pictures into corresponding years
- Splits each year into individual galleries
- Allows unlimited (from 1 to 1 zillion) photos per gallery
- Has full support for tagging (by Administrators only)
- Has full searching support
- Has full slideshow support for all pictures, all pictures from a specific year, and all pictures from a specific gallery
- It also automatically updates the homepage, and eventually the sitemap as well.
- It features an easy-to-use Administrator CMS for managing gallery content.
- It was also designed to be very ‘modular’, so I can use many of the same class structures to do a document/white paper ‘gallery’ or a video/multimedia ‘gallery’ as well.
Writing those thousands of lines of PHP code certainly took a while, but the final product was certainly worth it.
Marc,
You might want to try Web Gallery Wizard PRO. The program files reside on your computer, so you can create and edit the gallery on your computer, and then upload the entire gallery to your school’s server. It’s fast, easy and the resulting galleries look great. www.webgallerywizard.com/go
Dynamic Drive has many useful html, java, and javascript codes available for websites.
Photoshop Photo Gallery generator is pretty cool and integrated into photoshop which alot of people have. Check out:
http://rice870.com/photos.htm
I have used this before its FAST and easy http://www.ornj.net/webalbum/.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I’m going to give JAlbum and Web Gallery Wizard a try and see which one works better for me.
I have used a few things, JAlbum was one, and i wasn’t a huge fan. If you have access to programs like Adobe Photoshop / CS2, in there there is (under File -> Automate) a Create Web Photogallery. I have used this on my site, team1676.com, and have integrated it into the site’s theme by using IFRAMEs.
SPGM is what i am using this year. I was going to use gallery2 but it is too much for what I am doing right now. SPGM is also super easy to integrate into an existing layout, and there is no MySQL or anything involved. I ripped it apart to make it do the things I wanted bt even out of the box it is still really cool!
Team 703s Website has an image gallery we made from scratch using several of the different programming languages on our site, including: XHTML, CSS2, PHP5, and MySQL.
I’m not entirely sure how it works, but if you take a look at the image gallery, all pictures have automatically generated thumbnails and adding new images is easy for members. It is not my area of expertise, but if you’re interested I could ask our webmaster to give you some advice. 
i have a simple “gallery” thats pure css, you can add some script to though
we at www.palmacfirst.org use quickgal’s newest version which can be found here http://www.andyydev.com/index.php if you need any help feel free to contact me!
i think you already decided on one, but the one we use is really pleasing to the eye, easy to use, and does have a slideshow feature… robotics.brearley.org -> media and click on any of the albums, they each have the link to the program
all the best,
~Rhia
I coded the photo gallery for team 357. Here’s a spoiler snippet from our about page (gonna be released soon!)
The Media Management System allows authorized users to manipulate the elements within the multimedia display system.
The different functions within the system include single file uploading, category management and multi-file uploading. There is no additional permission checks on this page besides the initial media permission check. Basically, if a person has is_mm flagged in their privileges, they can access all functions within the media management system.