Last month, we looked at several free online photo gallery tools, to find which one would work best for a start-up or small-scale news website. Slide was the winner of that test, but since the article first appeared, we have found several other candidates.
To review: We are looking for a Web-based tool that allows a user to upload photos and have them displayed as a Flash photo gallery that can be embedded on another website. The tool must be free and its embedded gallery must work in all popular browsers and operating systems. Ideally, the tool would allow the creator to add captions and to control the display style, size and speed of the images.
Most such tools are built for people to add galleries of personal snapshots to their blogs or MySpace profiles. As a result, many offer loud graphics and animated transition elements, to help provide some “life” what are typically pretty dull images. We don’t want that. Our assumption is that the images presented in a gallery will be interesting by themselves, and we want a gallery that will help focus attention to the images, not distract from them with a slew of gimmicks.
To test each tool, we uploaded three images that OJR’s editor took during this year’s Rose Parade, then tried to build and embed a gallery composed of them. Slide’s tool met our technical requirements, though its heavy-handed use of promotional logos and links left us wishing for an even better alternative.
Will one of these options provide that?
Picasa
Google-owned Picasa has been offering online photo storage and printing services for some time now. But we hadn’t noticed the embedded photo gallery option until recently.
If you choose not to download Picasa’s bulk upload tool, you can upload images to the service five at a time. To create a photo gallery, you will want to upload your images to their own album. Once uploaded, it’s a simple process to add captions. Just click on the images then type the captions in the designated space. Once done, click to the “View Album” link to return to the main album maintenance page and retrieve the embed code.
Click on “Embed Slideshow” to finish the process. Picasa allows you to choose from five size options for your embedded slide show: width widths of 144, 288, 400, 600 and 800 pixels. The service also gives you the option whether to display captions within the gallery, or to enable auto-play of the images.
One hint: You will want to make sure that you select the “HTML Links” option. Picasa labels that option as “For Myspace,” but it is helpful for other readers, as it simply adds a text link to the gallery’s album on the Picasa website.
The big flaw we found with the Picasa galleries was that they did not display consistently in Safari browsers on Macs. The HTML link option at least provided a way for those readers to see the images, but having a blank black space where the images ought to be certainly frustrates. [Update (4/2008): We’re not seeing this problem any longer.]
PictureTrail
PictureTrail‘s home page looks straight from the Slide/RockYou school, and we tried it hopeful that this tool might tweak the formula just enough to edge out those options.
But to upload images, one has to register, which is a requirement on most of these services. However, none of them asked for a cell phone number (“for prizes”) or forced you to click to skip three forms, partially completed with your previously submitted personal data, designed to sign you up for various sweepstakes, coupon offers and whatnot.
The process reminds one of the endless chain of forms that suckers face when they click on one of those “Win a free plasma TV” banner ads.
We’d show you the gallery we created… if we hadn’t bailed on the site after the third come-on form. Three strikes, and we’re outta here.
BubbleShare
BubbleShare offers perhaps the quickest, easiest interface for uploading images. We could upload multiple images with no fuss and little delay.
The service threw us for a moment when it demanded registration in Step 2. But that process was painless enough, and didn’t slow us down on the way to creating our gallery. We opted for the default, “standard” theme for the gallery.
As intuitive as the initial image upload might have been, BubbleShare’s album editing screen left us scratching our heads a couple times. First, despite our photos being labeled “Rose1”, “Rose2” and “Rose3”, BubbleShare did not place them in the gallery in that order. (This was the only service not to sort images by file name or upload order.) To reorder the images, we had to click the “Sequence Photos” link, which left us confused as to how to get back to the album editing page. Once we figured that out, we clicked the wrong link three or four times before we found that the embed code is available behind the “Blog Album” link.
The “Gizmo Player” option allows three choices for gallery sizes: Small at 280 pixels, Medium at 372 pixels and Huge at 592 pixels. Unfortunately, that’s a 270-pixel gap between the larger two options, quite a bit of Web screen real estate.
We found that the small and medium options cut off our captions, without providing an intuitive way to mouseover or click to see the full text. Nor could creators or readers control the timing of the slide show, which did not start automatically, but required the reader to press a play button.
BubbleShare: Share photos – Play some Online Games.
SlideFlickr
We lamented last time the lack of a native slide show option for Flick photo galleries. However, this time we found SlideFlickr, which promised to create automatically a Flash photo gallery from any Flickr photo set.
All you need do is to input the URL of the Flickr set you want displays in the gallery. Of course, that means that you must upload the images to Flickr account first.
From there, you can select the gallery’s size, as well as its speed (slow, medium, fast). SlideFlickr offered even more options, though, such as the ability to include a logo within the gallery, as well as background music. That option requires you to select an online MP3 file for the gallery to reference, which could be a spoken narration, as well. Finally, the tool allowed us to select a Creative Commons license under which we’d like to publish the gallery.
Took bad the thing took forever to load. Plus, when we could get the gallery to appear, the user controls blocked much of the image.
The winner?
Ugh. Picasa’s lack of size options undercut what could have been an easy winner. As did BubbleShare’s lack of decent caption support.
So, as much as we wanted to fall in love with one of these other options, we can’t recommend any of them over the previous winner, Slide. Update: Given that we’re not seeing the Picasa problem with Safari anymore, we are moving that ahead of Slide as our pick for best free online tool, assuming that you can find a Picasa show in the size that you need. If not, we say… opt for Slide.
About Robert Niles
