So, I’m having trouble finding a reasonable gallery software.
Honestly, what I want is a service that allows me to export seamlessly from iPhoto, not worry about storage space or download limits, share with arbitrary people, allow for posted comments, look nice, run fast, and be free.
I know, that’s a tall order.
flickr limits you to 100Mb / month, which is a bit of a pain if you take more than a few pictures a month. Google Picasaweb limits you to 1 gigabyte forever, which seems almost worse. flickr pro costs money, SmugMug costs more money, and MobileMe costs the most of all.
That pretty much leaves “Gallery”, but the last time I tried running it on my DreamHost account, it was so slow as to be not even worthwhile. Yeah, DreamHost may allow you to install a wiki or a gallery, but if you want to USE them, you’re up slow creek without a paddle.
So, what that leaves, then, is iPhoto’s “Web Export” function. Now, I’m not sure about iPhoto ‘09, but iPhoto ‘08 produces HTML that’s lightweight, but… well… there’s no way to style it. Would it be so hard to include a couple of hooks so that one could toss a CSS stylesheet on the pages?
So now, my solution is to just post iPhoto galleries (here), and then, in the FAR OFF FUTURE, I plan to write a script that iterates through them and adds a CSS-stylesheet link to each page- and maybe wraps all of the ‘descriptions’ in a <small> tag. Maybe a link to some external Javascript for special effects. Who knows?