"featured shots" gallery for my website

[tim]

Right now my website has shedloads of pictures on it, including some travel ones, some experimental ones, test shots, and everything else you could think. It's reasonably well organised, but i'm going to make a "featured shots" area for it, so someone can easily see what I consider to be the best of my work.

I plan to have 3-4 areas, each with 6-8 photos in it. It might be smaller to start with, but I want it to be reasonably easy to add new pics. The layout should be suitable for a small number of featured pics. If there was a way to have a randomly selected photo on my home page, that'd be great too.

Does anyone know of free software that'll help me do this better than hand coding html? I can run php/perl no problem.

Edit - what i'm after is a gallery type program, not an html editor.

[mphoto]

Have you looked at the open source web authoring tool called Amaya? Check oit out at : http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

[tim]

That's just an html editor as far as I can see - i'm looking more for a gallery type program.

[kb244]

erm, you asked for something to help you better at 'hand coding html', things like an HTML editor would do that, heck even notepad would do that. If you want something to make you a gallery try the gallery maker in photoshop. Otherwise, learn something like a serversided scripting, such as PHP or ASP, and make a gallery code like how I did my site.

[tim]

Actually I said "Does anyone know of free software that'll help me do this better than hand coding html?" I can already do html, php, mysql, Java, etc, I just want to see if I can find a piece of software that'll save me the trouble. Your site looks pretty good kb244 :)

Exhibit engine doesn't seem quite right for what i'm after. Gallery (http://gallery.sourceforge.net) might be an option, but it's running really really slow and I can't see any examples right now. LIke I said, it's just for a small collection of photos, not my entire site.

[kb244]

Hrm what bout that coppermine gallery, same thing as your link?

[kb244]

http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/

[tim]

I'll take a look, thanks.

[pcasciola]

Since your background is similar to mine (I do HTML, JSP, MySQL, Oracle, Java, Javascript) you might like this Java based gallery program called JAlbum. I downloaded it but haven't had any time to check it out. Looks promising though.

http://www.jalbum.net/

I'm working on my own Java based gallery builder using Tomcat running on my local web server (nothing ever seems to quite meet my needs), but that's yet another project I don't have enough time for. One of these days......

[tim]

I already use JAlbum for most of my site. I could find a skin that suited what I want I guess, but for some reason i'm thinking more along the lines of a gallery program, or even hand coded html, to go for that really classy and professional look. I don't just want a gallery, I want some kind of blurb about what I do and why there too.

Custom html might be the way to go, but it's the least easily maintained.

[pcasciola]

What about Flash? There are some really nice Flash templates out there for anywhere from $50-1000 that are pretty impressive.

These are the more expensive ones, but are really professional looking:

http://www.bludomain.com

Also, have you ever seen the ebay Flash gallery for auto auctions? It's an IPIX flash file that I figured out how to stuff you own pictures in to if you just follow their naming convention. It makes for a pretty decent looking gallery that you can include in any HTML page.

Here's a sample. If you look closely, you will actually see a Ferrari in some of the pictures. ;)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4523503909

[tim]

I don't like flash or Java applets, they annoying the hell out of me, and I hate sites that require them. Thanks for the suggestion, but i'll stick with html or a gallery program.

[tim]

btw that ebay site crashed Mozilla when I tried to visit it!

[pcasciola]

btw that ebay site crashed Mozilla when I tried to visit it!

That's weird. I'm running 0.9.2 of Firefox (never bothered to upgrade it).

[tim]

It could be that I had about 10 tabs open, 3 of them loading pages at the same time... i'm on what I think's the latest version of mozilla. Are they still writing that or have they given up after firefox stole the show?

[toddb]

[QUOTE=pcasciola]
These are the more expensive ones, but are really professional looking:

http://www.bludomain.com

[QUOTE]

I liked allot of those flash sites, they did look pretty classy. They were very easy to navigate I thought. I'm with you guys, I have the software skills, but not much time to actually do it. I'm thinking of figuring out the PhotoShop scripting and make that web gallery stuff more custom, I'll let you know if I ever get time to figure it out.