Projects for Image Preservation & Sharing
> Projects for Community Historical Societies
Sharing Photos and Documents in Image Galleries on the
Internet
Adding an Image Gallery into a Website
As mentioned before, price and complexity of image gallery software are not highly correlated. Some of the most powerful and complex image gallery software programs are very expensive and some are free.
In response to the expense and limitations of many software packages, groups of web designers have collaborated on alternatives. Two such freeware collaborations include Coppermine Gallery and Gallery. Although used commonly by professionals and offered as free features by many website hosting companies, the use of this software requires a fair amount of web design and hosting server operation knowledge. One can quickly get lost while reading through the related setup instructions, help forums, and other user information.
On the other hand, many easy to use and sophisticated image gallery software packages are quite costly and include many bells and whistles that are simply not needed by typical community historical societies. A couple of these to explore include Lightbox Photo Gallery, and Shozam Web Gallery Generator. Most commercially available paid image gallery software packages are priced in tiers with additional cost for software that provides the ability to market images and for business uses.
Some image editing software programs such as
Adobe Photoshop Elements 7
A simple solution for a webmaster with some web design knowledge is to download and use a free "lite" version of image gallery software. Many software companies offer a "lite" version of their software in the hopes that you will ultimately purchase a premium version with additional bells and whistles. In the case of image gallery software, these bells and whistles would include many additional customization options, theme presentations, and perhaps animation effects.
In most cases, I believe that many of these bells and whistles actually detract. If a webmaster is on a low budget but still wants to create image galleries within a society website or wants to provide some teasers and links to external image galleries, I suggest that you download and explore Web Album Generator from ornj.net. This simple but effective free software allows just enough customization to blend the color scheme into a website, and provides a simple and clean looking web site image gallery that meets all the basic criteria for an image gallery. Take a look at a sample image gallery created with Web Album Generator. This software uploads images that you select and handles the resizing and creates all necessary gallery files. Once created, you can copy all necessary files to your website and simply provide a link to the "index" page that drives the image gallery. Note that there is a "tip jar" at the download site as the software is donation supported. Also note that I selected the color scheme of the gallery and text.
Image Gallery Conclusions
There are many alternatives and combinations of
alternatives available to expand online image sharing activities.
A society need not have a website or volunteer web design expertise to
get started. Societies with some expertise and a website may still
find it advantageous to leverage their image display activities or even
to market some special images by using inexpensive third party services
available from providers such as
Shutterfly.comor SmugMug.com.
If someone
in a society can scan images and place them in a folder on their
computer, the society has the ability to create an online image gallery.
Beyond that, additional sharing and fundraising options are numerous.
