Saturday, November 06, 2004

Two more candidates for the fridge.

The fridge, being my analogy for a place I might put this software until it reaches it use by date. Then I'll have to throw it out. Well that's unless some interesting applications comes along that might be worthy of a bit more testing.

When you do a search for photo album software in google by far the majority of what is turned up are actually web album generators, meaning they will take your images and write the HTML code to display them on the web. A lot are very humble ones indeed, but most are free. Using the thumbnail idea, where a small image is shown initially, forming a graphic button to the larger image is a pretty universal method and works well on the web, because it saves bandwidth and the "album" pages will be displayed quickly.

These two deserve a bit of consideration if creating an album on the web is what you want to do.

1) Neowise's Express Web Gallery Maker: this has probably been around a fair while because I have seen quite a lot of web galleries generated with it. It is 1-2-3-4-5 steps simple and produces a neat set of pages automatically for you. It uses a square format for the thumbnails with nice drop shadow. Verdict FAST & EASY does thenjob well but a maybe a bit boring (there is a newer verion on their site)

WEB Page generate by Express Web Galleries

2) JAlbum: is a very sophisticated little thing in very humble wrapping (it uses a non graphic dilogue forms type interface). However, it offers a lot of options and styles (they are called skins) in the final output. It will be really perfect for digital photo galleries as it can include a display of all the camera EXIF metadata. Verdict SLOW but fascinating, WORTH A LOOK (and be warned the install is not that self explainatory, if in doubt get a computer to geek to help)

Main Index Page in an XP skin clicking on an thumbnail shows a larger image and metadata about the photo

Index page in the Film Skin

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