Millions of people use Internet photo-sharing services such as Kodakeasysharegallery (formerly ofoto.com - what were they thinking with that new name?) and Snapfish to share their photos with friends and families.

I have used Ofoto for some years and found that there are many disadvantages:

- the thumbnails and full-size photos are too small

- you can't see which are the most popular photos

- you can't have multiple albums from different people for one event

- you can't subscribe to updates so that you are alerted when new photos are published

- the whole purpose of these sites is to sell you prints, so there is a lot of annoying “calls-to-action” and advertising

Thankfully there is an Open Source (freely available) solution to sharing photos on the Internet, and it's called Gallery. I recently set up it up for a wedding, and the experiment was surprisingly successful. Within the first few weeks of the Gallery going live, friends who attended the wedding in Antigua had uploaded more than 800 gorgeous photos (see the sample below). Most of these were uploaded in their original full size format (files from 2 to 7 MB) and so can be printed from any color printer.

The happy couple

A beach in Antigua (photo courtesy of Dino)

Even though Gallery is a wonderful piece of software, it still has a few drawbacks:

- installation can be tricky if it's your first time

- easy to use is not exactly the best way to describe it

- the look is not easily customizable

Gallery 2.0 is allegedly coming soon so these issues maybe resolved with that release. I'll keep you updated.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 7:56 pm and is filed under How To's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.