Over the past few months I have spent some time looking into the freely available photo gallery tools out there. I have been looking for a tool that would allow me to store my photos in a simple directory structure but browse the folders through a web browser. The right tool for the job needed to be:

• simple to use
• create thumbnails of various sizes
• easy to navigate
• no stupid features that nobody would use

I tried quite a few of them (curator, Gallery, webmagick and more) and thought that most of them either sucked or weren't what I was looking for. There were also quite a few non-free gallery programs out there, but many of these also sucked, though some looked pretty good. I was getting close to the point where I was going to start evaluating the non-free options, when I came across My Photo Gallery.

Apart from the fact that it has a stupid name, it actually did everything I was looking for and more. Here are some of the key features of My Photo Gallery:

• dynamic thumbnail generation
• optional pre-generation of thumbnails
• separation of gallery files from program data files and thumbnails
• simple template
• nice and simple navigation
• generates thumbnails of various sizes for browsing
• integration with Shutterfly
• simple comments

I really like the fact that it will generate thumbnails in multiple sizes. Five megapixel photos are great for printing, but suck to download and view in the browser. Using My Photo Gallery, I can browse all my photos in 640x480 resolution. Not only does this make the browsing experience nicer, since the images fit in my browser window, but it also makes the experience quicker, since I am downloading over my slow cable modem upload speed.

My Photo Gallery will dynamically resize images the first time you view them if you like, but this can be slow. It does cache the images that it generates dynamically, but this can still be a pain for the first user who has to wait around for the server to generate the images. If you don't want to subject users of your gallery to that pain, you can also have MPG automagically generate the thumbnails ahead of time. MPG comes with a simple little command-line utility that will spider the entire gallery and generate thumbnails. By default, it generates the small thumbnail and the 640x480 one. However, with a simple command-line flag, you can force it to generate other thumbnail sizes as well.

Overall, a very good tool that did far more than I expected without adding dumb features that take away from the user's experience. 3:44:12 PM    comment []