Features

Summary
Detail

Summary

A Gallery is a collection of photo albums. You can have as many Galleries as you want on your web server. Each gallery contains as many photo albums as you want. Configuration of Gallery and administration of the photo albums is done entirely via an intuitive, web interface. You don't need special privileges on your webserver to install, configure and maintain Gallery. It's free, and we (the Gallery team) support it.

Detail

Configuration Wizard

Gallery comes with a handy web based configuration wizard. This wizard helps to make sure that your web server and operating system are set up correctly. It allows you to configure many of Gallery's options while determining as much as it can from your environment. The wizard will create an admin account for you. This is a special account that allows you to create other user accounts, create albums, and set album permissions.

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.

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.

Mirroring Albums

Gallery lets you mirror your albums on as many remote servers as you like. This lets you run your Gallery on a machine with limited bandwidth (like over a DSL line) but still serve up your images quickly from a high bandwidth source like an ISP. Gallery will not actually mirror the files for you. You're responsible for doing it yourself. I use a program called rsync. You can use whatever you want. If the remote album is up to date, Gallery will use it. If not, Gallery will use the local one.

Gallery Remote

Gallery comes with a Java application called Gallery Remote (more information) that your users can use to upload photos to your Gallery via a drag-and-drop interface. You can download Gallery Remote from the Download Page

Users

A user (provided the admin 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.

Embedding Gallery

Gallery is compatible with Nuke 5.0+ and Post-Nuke as an add-on module. Simply put your gallery directory inside the Nuke modules directory and you're all set. All the regular Gallery features will work properly while embedded inside Nuke, and Gallery will have the same look and feel as the rest of your Nuke site.

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 (example 1, example 2) 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). You can find out more about MANY more customizations further down in the user guide underneath the Customization area

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 various photo printing services. Your viewers can order prints via them with a single click.

  • Short URL's -- If you have the mod_rewrite capability on your webserver (this is a module for Apache, and many ISPs enable it) you can use very short URLs for each picture which makes it easier to email them around.

  • 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.