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Freeware Menu >> Web album software.


Preamble.

Over the last few years, it has become very popular, to display your digital camera photographs on the internet. This has lead to a proliferation of online picture sharing sites, such as Photobucket and Flickr.

I haven't had much to do with picture sharing sites, but recently a friend sent me a link to their online pictures and although the pictures displayed fairly well, I was surprised by how slow the site loaded, weighed down as it was, with thumbnails and adverts.
Now, I use dialup, so I don't expect blistering performance, but the pages must be sluggish, even on broadband, as there are so many separate page elements. Also, as I signed up for and tested other sites, I was surprised to find, that quite a few don't work properly with Opera, or Firefox.

This got me thinking, perhaps a picture album hosted on the free space, that most ISPs provide, would work much better. It would lack the social aspect of a picture sharing site, but should load much faster and be quicker to create, as most of the upload systems I tried, were painfully slow, mainly I suspect, because the sites have so much traffic (the price of popularity).
It is possible to simply create a web page manually, complete with thumbnails etc. But it is quite a bit of work and a program to do the same job would be much better.
Ideally any album that the software picture album created, would meet certain criteria. It should be easy to use, but with a reasonable amount of options available, to customise your album. And any album created, should display properly in Internet Explorer based browsers, Opera and Firefox. Below are listed several that I have tried, with varying degrees of success.

Rob.



AAA Photo Album v1.10

The AAA Photo Album produces pure HTML albums, with no Flash, or Javascript elements, so they should display properly in any browser.
The index thumbnails can be displayed with a variety of border styles, which you can extensively modify to your own preferences and save for future use.
Captions can be added to photos and the size of both thumbnails and full size images can be set.

AAA Photo Album, main window.

When you generate your finished album, you can save the project file, for future updating. Unusually for web album generators, you can modify a previous project as much as you like, changing any settings.
Once you are happy with your album, the built in FTP option can upload the album to your web space.
I found that the albums can be slightly marred by the navigation and "generated by" bar at the bottom of the album, which may display part way up the screen at higher screen resolutions, or if the size or number of images is quite small.

The AAA Photo Album is very easy to use, but it does have a few minor bugs and oddities, such as the lack of new album and help buttons on the main interface (the help button only appears on the start up wizard and generate web album windows). Despite these minor annoyances, AAA Photo Album does produce very good albums and there are some nice examples on the web site.

Freeware -- Download size 3.16MB -- Win 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Vista

http://www.uploadalbum.com/



Porta.

I found Porta by a rather roundabout route. I was looking at PhotoOnWeb, another freeware web album creator. PhotoOnWeb is not bad and has some nice ideas, but it is a bit buggy, so I'm not going to add it to my site. But I noticed that it used a Flash program called Simple Viewer to display the web albums.
So I visited the Simple Viewer site and found that on its own, Simple Viewer is quite a good (if basic) web album maker. It can be used as a plugin to a variety of other graphics programs, or if you want total control, it can be used on its own, by manually editing its configuration files.
One of the associated programs mentioned on the Simple Viewer site was Porta.

Porta, web album creator.

Porta is a deceptively simple looking piece of software, but pressing all the buttons, reveals a wide range of options.
Porta can produce either a HTML album, or a combined HTML/Flash album, where the Flash album powered by Simple Viewer, is displayed by default, but if Flash is unavailable the HTML album is displayed.
The produced albums display correctly in Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox and SeaMonkey.

During installation Porta gives the option of adding a shortcut to the right click menu. Creating an album is then as simple as right clicking on a folder and clicking "start".
Album images can be either jpeg, or tiff formats and Porta can automatically alter the size and quality to your specifications during album creation. Captions can be added to images and a mouseover caption is available with the HTML album.
I found Porta to be quite impressive. A basic help file is included, but you will need to spend some time trying all the features, to fully understand its capabilities.

I created a simple HTML album as a demo. Note that the image quality isn't great, that's my pictures, not Porta. Also note that any web album will be a compromise, depending on the screen resolution of the author. I run at 800*600, so have set the image sizes and layout to look best at that screen size.
Robs Porta demo album.

Freeware -- Download size 599K -- Win 2000, XP

http://www.stegmann.dk/mikkel/porta/



Web Album Generator v 1.8.2

Web Album Generator, is a simple to use, wizard based program, that makes creating your album very easy. Simply select your pictures (jpg only), give the pictures titles and captions and arrange the order in which they are displayed.
Once you are happy with your selection, choose "Generate Web Album" and a wizard will take you through selecting a colour scheme, the thumbnail layout, page navigation and maximum picture size and finally your web album will be created.

Web album generator, the page format wizard.

You can edit an existing album, making adding new pictures simple, although you will need to upload the entire finished folder.
Web Album Generator comes with an excellent help file and a step, by step tutorial.

There are a few things not mentioned in the help file, which can be useful.
The name of the output folder for your web album, should be in lowercaste letters, with no spaces, ie: robalbum01. This prevents possible problems when the folder is uploaded to the web space.
Web Album Generator will automatically do a good job, of reducing the size of any images, that are bigger than your specified maximum size. But smaller high quality images may benefit from being saved at a lower picture quality in your image editor beforehand, thus reducing the file size and web page loading time.

Once you have your web album folder, you need to upload it to a web space. Most ISPs provide some excellent free space. But if yours doesn't, you could sign up with a free host.
For the purpose of this exercise I signed up with Freehostia, who provide a very generous 250Mb of web space, with no adverts. There is a file size limit of 500k, but this shouldn't be a problem for a web album (if any of your pictures are bigger than 500k, you're doing something very wrong).

Uploading your web album is quite simple, Web Album Generator, suggests a method using Network Places, but this doesn't seem to exist on my computer. It is possible to use Windows Explorer to upload using FTP (FTP is what you use to send files to a web space), but I have always found it a bit hit and miss, some ISPs simply wont connect. So my suggestion is to use Whiz FTP, a very basic FTP program, which is easy to use, reliable and a small download.

I have uploaded my sample web album to Freehostia, you can view it at:
http://robgoldfish.freehostia.com/robalbum01/

Note: my digital camera is very old, which is why the pictures aren't great, 0.3 megapixels I think!

Note: To update your album, the simplest method is to delete the current album and then upload the new one.
You can have multiple albums on your web space, just give each album a different name. I usually add a number to the end of any folder of this type, so I might have, robalbum01, robalbum02, robalbum03, etc.

Freeware -- Download size 808k -- Win 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista

http://www.ornj.net/webalbum/



Microsoft power tools: HTML Slide Show Wizard.

The Slide Show Wizard is very easy to use, with just two steps. First select your pictures and then choose the maximum picture size, add a title and author name and choose from an advanced, or simple slideshow.

Microsoft power tools -- HTML slideshow wizard.

The results using the advanced slideshow are pretty good, with three different views, slideshow, filmstrip and previews.
But there is a major disadvantage to using the Slide Show Wizard, the produced web album only displays correctly in Internet Explorer based browsers. In Opera and Firefox, the page doesn't work correctly, which is a problem nowadays, with so many people using alternate browsers.

Because of this limitation, the Slide Show Wizard is best suited for producing quick, hassle free slide shows for local use on computers, rather than internet based web albums.

I created a small example web album using the Slide Show Wizard, which you can view here:
Demo Slide Show Wizard album

Free -- Download size 416K -- Win XP

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx



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