Photo Album Generators Type "photo album generator" into Google and get nearly 150,000 hits. Download an exe from one of them and give yourself a dose of the latest virus. Not very useful. So this page tells you about products I have tried, some of which are used on this site. The good ones are at the top of the list and the crap ones are at the end. There's a link to the product's site and I've also produced a demonstration album for each one. I've used the same 30 photographs for each album demo so although you may get tired looking at the same photos, the choice of photos should not influence your choice of album. So far I've looked at HTML and flash generators. I was going to look at some Ajax applications ( eg Highslide ) but there's now a highslide skin in JAlbum (see below) so all the hard work is taken out ! Here's an album I made with it recently. I have looked at some PHP album generators but have not been impressed by the ones I have tried. There is a report on one of the better ones below. This one is, in my opinion, the best of the bunch by M I L E S AND M I L E S . Here are just a few of the things which make it so special: It's absolutely free (but you can - and should - make a donation) Add captions, EXIF, customised links. Edit at a later date Hundreds of terrific looking skins Drag and drop editor. Photos displayed in any order you choose. Nested folders Works on any site - built from plain old HTML. No Flash or other plug-ins needed Incorporate in your site or run stand alone Published API so you can play with it to your heart's content Take a look at my demonstration album now. Airtight Interactive Next are three flash albums from the same author, Felix Turner. Again they are all free. They are all lightweight and easy to use, since the flash part of the album is just a reader. The actual files are kept in separate folders and the reader finds them by reading an XML file. There are scripts available from the same site for different photo editors, which automate the process of producing the XML file. I used the one for Google's Picasa, since Picasa is also a free download. The script produces a set of files which are ready to uploaded to your web site, including an HTML page with the flash reader embedded in it. All very easy and I recommend all three of them - they are the flash equivalent of JAlbum. Autoviewer. This has captions and you can set the order in which the pictures are displayed, by editing the XML file after it's been written. See my demonstration album Simpleviewer This also has captions and you can set the display order in the same way as Autoviewer. The source code for this one can be purchased, so provided you have a flash editing environment you can do much more with it. See my demonstration album Postcard viewer This is the simplest of the three - there are no captions and you can't choose the display order - you'll see why when you have looked at the demo. It's very effective though, and usually makes most people go "Wow" when they first see it. See my demonstration album SlideShowPro This one is not free, but it's very very good. It's a flash album. This is my first slide show made with SlideShowPro. At $29 it's not going to break the bank. You will be able to produce much more varied slideshows if you have Macromedia Flash MX2400, Flash 8 or Adobe Flash CS3, but you can use a supplied precompiled swf. It's designed like the products from Airtight Interactive (above) - There's a folder full of pictures, an XML file which lists all the pictures and a flash swf file which plays them all back. Their web site shows some very sophisticated effects. I'm just starting to learn how to use it, so the demo will have more bells and whistles as time goes by. Google's free offering is very simple and very effective. My demonstration album is made from Picasa. This produces the usual combination of html pages, thumbnails and images, which you then load up to your website. You can give the album a title, but there are no captions for individual pictures. You can set the display order by dragging and moving the pictures in Picasa's browser. You can set the size and compression of the pictures and the thumbnails. You can't persist the settings so you can't change/edit an album once it is finished. But it's so quick to make a new one that this really is not a problem. But take a look at the online version of this album. It's created by Picasa and resides on a Google box somewhere. You get 1Gb of free storage. This is very cool ! Why pay hosting companies for photo web sites when you can have this ?. And you can embed a flash movie of your album in a web page. Here's a free PHP-driven album generator. The demonstration album is hosted on a Linux based server - all the other albums on this page are on a Windows server. It was a bit of a bugger to set up (confusing instructions) but now it's there it's easy to look after. It works fine on my Synology DS107e too and also I got it to work on Windows XP here at home but had no success with Win Server 2003. Neither did the support staff at the company where my web sites are hosted and in the end after several days of unsuccessful fiddling around with it, I just gave up trying to use it in a Windows environment. There is no slideshow or adjustable viewing order. The slides in this demo are sorted by their "short title" as you'll see. But you can send the pictures to EMail recipients as an "ECard". You can configure it pretty much as you want. I changed the title on this demo, but didn't spend time playing with the rest of the options. You don't have to know anything about PHP to use it. There's good"ish" support from an on-line Forum. The next album generator is part of Dreamweaver - used to be Macromedia but is now Adobe. My demonstration album was made with the Macromedia MX2004 version of Dreamweaver - a nearly £400 piece of software and very highly rated amongst the web design community. And it's absolute and total pants, crap and rubbish. Not only does it look awful, it's very hard to use. The settings for the album are not saved so if you make a mistake, its back to square one. This is one to steer clear of. The rest of Dreamweaver is OK, its just this bit that sucks. Here's another one to avoid - this is the HTML album generator in Photoshop Elements 4. For some reason that I was unable to figure out in a reasonable time (60 minutes), it would only read 24 of the 30 files I had in the source folder so my demonstration album is incomplete. All the other programmes read all 30 files, but not Photoshop. No captions, no persistence of settings so you can't go back and change things once the album is made. Very twee designs. No idea what size the pictures are generated at..etc..etc.. This is another stinker and best avoided. Finally another flash offering. The idea is great, but the execution is flawed and buggy. The version I have is 3 years old. Maybe the latest version is better, but as there are no free (or even reduced price) upgrades I'm not willing to throw any more money at it. I expect to get free fixes for buggy software. It plays a slide show. The files are incorporated into the main flash file, so this rapidly becomes very large. The demonstration slide show is nearly 800kB for 30 pictures of size 220 * 180 px. (NB - opens in a pop-up window). There is supposed to be captions, but entering the text in the clumsy editor crashes the program and you lose all your work. So not really up to the job and not recommended. And now you can get a free one which works a treat from Google - see above. If you have any comments please get in touch. If you have your own favourite album generator and it's not listed here, tell me about it and I'll add it to the list once I have had a play with it.