I have been searching for a web gallery solution forever. None of the existing ones seem to suit my needs 100%:-
- Easy to setup galleries and folders
- Good viewer UI
- Handles meta data (EXIF) sensibly
- Looks good
Gallery is popular, but IMHO fails miserably in 2 and 4 above. The viewer UI is just plain awful.
Some thoughtless attempts at building a web photo gallery here, done w/ a trial version of iView Media Pro and here, done w/ Picasa.
The advantages of using desktop software to create static web photo gallery are that the software is generally much easier to use, and because all the files are static (i.e. no server-side code running on the web server) performance is also much better.
Both iView Media Pro and Picasa are easy to use. IVMP is a US$150 piece of software, which I am not willing to pay for. Picasa is free, but runs only on Windows. iView Media is US$50, but is so stripped down I don’t think it’s worth the trouble.
Checking out the results, I think the photo files created by iView Media Pro is actually better, as those created by Picasa seem to be of the wrong gamma. Maybe for US$150 one indeed gets a more polished professional tool.
Having said this, Picasa’s viewer UI is much better than the one I picked with iView Media Pro (there are a few to choose from). The navigation links in Picasa’s viewer UI stay at the same place on the screen, while the ones in the iView Media Pro viewer UI jump about depending on the size/orientation of the photos, which is a real PITA. I also like the fact that Picasa’s index page shows all the thumbnails on the same page.
No, unfortunately it ain’t IVMP nor Picasa. The search goes on.
3 responses so far ↓
1 James // Dec 9, 2004 at 12:05 am
Looks like IVMP not only has better gamma, but also better color and better sharpness than Picasa also. I never knew a gallery generating program would display the same photos differently.
2 tin_the_fatty // Dec 9, 2004 at 5:21 am
IVMP is cheating in a sense: the JPEG files are about 10 times as big as those created by Picasa.
It might be important for a gallery generating program to have some user control on the JPEG compression level.
3 James // Dec 9, 2004 at 7:11 am
I edit and resize my photos with PS before posting whether I use Picasa or not, and I select Origial Size in Picasa. This does take a lot longer but no wonder I wasn’t aware of any difference in photo quality.