February 28, 2008
Which is the best free photo gallery editor?
By Robert Niles
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(Update: Part two, where we test four more online slide show editors.)
Flash photo galleries have been delivering traffic to news websites for years. Colorful, dynamic, engaging -- the galleries can help enliven a Web page and keep readers lingering on a site.
But you don't need to have a Flash developer on staff to build a Flash photo gallery. Nor do you need to pay for a point-and-click photo gallery development tool. Several "Web 2.0" start-ups have developed easy-to-use free photo gallery development tools, primarily to help younger Web readers trick out their MySpace and Facebook profiles with personal slide shows.
Yeah. I know. You don't want your photo gallery to feature star wipes, a glitter background, some unsigned band's alt-rock clip for a soundtrack and enough image movement to make the whole thing look like a promotional trailer for "Cloverfield 2." But if you take some time to select non-default layout options, some of the free slideshow services allow you to create Flash photo galleries that would fit well on many news websites.
But which ones? For that, I took several popular slide show tools for a test drive. (I used three images I took while watching this year's Tournament of Roses Parade, down the street from my home in Pasadena, Calif.)
All the tools below are free to use, host your images and provide HTML that you can copy and paste on your site to embed the photo gallery. In addition, I wanted to find a service that would allow me to control the size, format and function of the gallery, as well as to include full-text captions on each image. Ideally, the galleries also would allow the user some control over which images they wanted to look at, as well.
Two of the more popular photo services on the Web, Flickr and Snapfish, offered online photo galleries, but not convenient way to embed those galleries on other websites. So, I did not include them in this article.
Also, while looking for other photo services, I discovered Scrapblog, a gallery editor that provided a free interface that looked much like the Flash editor itself. On first glance, Scrapblog appeared to do for Flash what Picnik does for Photoshop -- provide a good chunk of the functionality through a free, Web-based interface. We'll take a closer look at Scrapblog in a future OJR article.
Slide
Slide is primarily a slide show development tool. Since you likely will be including more than one photo in your gallery, Slide allows a user to upload multiple files at once. It defaults to a "collage," which by now is cliche even for a MySpace page. Whatever you do, don't opt for the "News" layout, however, unless you're building a website to look like a Howard Hawks flick.I clicked the "View More" option to see additional designs, then selected "Gallery," which offered the most neutral transition element I could find on the site. No skin, no theme, no music, either. I switched to a transparent background, and kept the gallery at the default "medium" width, which was 426 pixels.
Slide allowed me to click on each image, thumbnailed at the bottom of the page, to add and edit individual captions, as well as their color and text size. On the user's side, the embedded gallery includes controls to move forward and back in and to stop the image rotation.
Photobucket
Photobucket is more a full-function photo hosting service, closer to Flickr than Slide. Here, I had to upload images one at a time.Photobucket's user interface made adding titles and descriptions to each image fairly simple. But creating a slide show took more steps than was required on Slide. I clicked "create slideshow," then had to select each of my uploaded images that I wanted in my gallery.
The second step was to select my transition style. Photobucket defaulted to "show," but I chose "fade" instead. The third and final option is gallery size, where I chose the "medium" (480 pixels) option.
On Photobucket, your image titles are displayed as your captions. The image descriptions never make it into the embedded gallery. Nor can you control the gallery's transition speed, background color or caption size or color. Readers can't control the image display, either.
Webshots
Webshots allows users to upload multiple photos at once, as part of a four-step upload process that threw me the first time I tried it.I clicked the "Add Files" button again, thinking that would upload the photos. Nope, that just allowed me to select more files for upload. One has to scroll down the page and complete the other three steps in creating or assigning an album for your photos to get to the upload button.
That done, I was able to quickly add titles and captions to the images I'd uploaded. But having to click "View Album" to save it threw me once again. And to create a slide show for my images, I had to find the "slideshow" link, buried among many other options on the right side of the page.
Webshots does not allow you to select a transition style, and if you upload photos larger than the gallery's display size, it does a "Ken Burns effect" on them.
Like Photobucket, Webshots displays the image titles as captions, with the entered descriptions nowhere to be found. (Readers can see them only if they click on the gallery, which spawns another browser window for that image's display page on the Webshots' website, where the description is included.) Designers cannot control the color, size or transition speed of their photo gallery, but Webshots' galleries do give the reader the ability to speed up, slow down or pause the image display, which is a very nice touch.
Which is all very nice if your readers have PCs. Because Webshots' embedded galleries would not display in Safari browsers on Macs. Oops.
RockYou
RockYou, like Slide, is designed as a slide show tool. I had to upload images one at a time, and found the on-screen instructions to "click 'Browse'" to upload those files confusing, since I was working on a Mac, where the upload button says "Choose File" instead.Given the site's name, it shouldn't surprise that the first option after uploading your files is to select the music accompaniment for the gallery. I chose none and instead opted to select the transition style, where I opted for "plain." I picked the clear background and the large size display, which turned out to be 450 pixels width.
Like Slide, RockYou also allows the designer to control the captions displayed on each images, as well as their color and text size. But website readers don't have any controls to stop or move forward or back through the image display.
Viewbook
Viewbook is in beta, unlike the previous options, which are in full release. Viewbook seems to be positioning itself more as a professional image presentation tool, competing more with PowerPoint than the likes of Slide.As a result, Viewbook offers a cool, clean black-and-white interface. If using the options above is like walking into Spencer's Gifts, Viewbook is Hugo Boss. Viewbook provides easy-to-follow instructions that walk the user through creating a gallery. I uploaded my images, then clicked each to edit the title and caption.
Under "Options," a user can opt to go with the deafulat "Album" style or to create a PowerPoint-style presentation. One can choose the position of the thumbnails in the photo album, as well as the background color. Selecting "preview," I was excited t find that Viewbook created a gallery that not only displayed the image title, but also the first few words of the caption, with a click option to read the full thing.
Unfortunately, Viewbook did not give me any option on the display size of the embedded photo gallery, which is a rather puny 400 pixels, and when I looked at that gallery, I found no titles or captions on the page. Nor was there an auto-play function. The reader has to click on the gallery to get the images to advance.
The winner?
Well, Webshots was the clear loser, both for its platform compatibility issues and its lack of flexibility on image transition. Viewbook offered promise, but needs to offer more options on its embedded galleries to be a significant player in this space. Photobucket also lost points for not enabling reader controls on image display, and for its misleading use of image titles and descriptions. (One must type the desired on-screen caption as the image title, not description, to force its proper display.)That left RockYou and Slide as the contenders, with the nod going to Slide, despite it rather garish intro screen. Slide allows user control of their galleries' size, format and function, as well as including easy-to-edit full-text captions on each image and reader control over the display of the images.
No, none of these options give you the creative control and flexibility of an in-house Flash designer. But the price of these services (free) certainly is more affordable for solo publishers and community start-ups looking for an easy, quick, no-bandwidth solution to put up an interactive news photo gallery.
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Comments:
From Robert Niles on February 29, 2008 at 9:50 AM
Soundslides is not free, which is why I didn't include it here. But I'm eager to do a Part 2 of this, with other services, if readers would send me ones that they've used and that I missed.For Part 3, then we can compare the top free services to some of the paid ones, such as Soundslides.
From 216.170.142.17 on February 29, 2008 at 10:02 AM
SoundSlides may not be free, but at $30, the rpice is hardly a barrier to entry.For free, I can't beat jAlbum. Instead of being a web service, it is a piece of desktop software that creates a gallery for use on your site (much like SoundSlides). It offers complete control over presentation so your web designer won't hate it and it can integrate into an existing website with relative ease. Out-of-the-box it is not for the absolute beginner, but we are working on a step-by-step instruction sheet so anyone in the newsroom can go from pile-of-digital-photos to a web presentation within our publishing tool on their own.
From 76.186.115.27 on February 29, 2008 at 10:34 AM
If you are looking for creative control, JAlbum is a free program that you can download to create both html and flash galleries. Unlike these other services, you host JAlbum galleries on your own server so that you have more control. You can even build your own template if you'd like to mess around with stylesheets and or hit counter coding.http://jalbum.net/
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From 204.137.15.32 on February 29, 2008 at 7:22 AM
Maybe this is too old school to have included here, but we use Soundslides. What do you think of that? How do you think it compares to these? I don't use it directly myself, but my photogs seem happy with it.