Search for gallery in google and Menalto’s Gallery is always the first result. Gallery is an open source web based photo album organizer. It gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you’re running a small personal site or a large community site.

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP and database support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums and photos can have view, edit, delete and other permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy.

Sure, you can upload your photos and screenshots to services like flickr and photobucket. But setting up Gallery on your web space will give you the ultimate control on who can view what photos in what albums and sub albums. Also free photo hosting/sharing accounts usually put a limit on the bandwidth or the file size or number of photos.

Below are detailed instructions on how to set up Gallery on your web site. To install Gallery, your web host needs to support PHP and MySQL with support for a graphic toolkit like NetPBM/ImageMagick/GD (most budget hosts like DreamHost do now a days). Before proceeding to do the manual installation, check to see whether your host’s admin/control panel already provides a 1-click installation (via Fantastico for example).

Gallery comes in two versions (1.x.x and 2.x.x) and various flavors within each version. We’ll install the typical package of Gallery 2.2.4. A typical package includes the base application, 8 themes and a selection of popular modules. Enough to satisfy the demands of most Gallery users.

Our Gallery installation URL is: http://www.howtotuts.com/demos/gallery.

1. Download either the zip or tar.gz file to your computer (tar.gz file is smaller, but you need to have winrar installed to be able to extract it).
2. Extract the contents of the archive.

   

3. Connect via a FTP client like FileZilla to your web space and navigate to where you want to install Gallery. Create a directory called g2data where gallery will store all the images. For security reasons, add a random string to the end of this directory name (e.g. g2data_21c6315496). CHMOD this directory to 777.
4. Upload the files and folders to your web host.

   

5. Set up the database
   • Create a database for Gallery (if your host only provides one, you can use that)
   • Create a database user (if your host limits you to only one user, not a problem..that username will do)
   • Assign all database privileges to the user
   • Note the database user password
6. Open up your web browser and browse to the install directory. Ex.: http://www.howtotuts.com/demos/gallery/install
   • Click Begin Installation
   • Create or download (left click, don’t right click and ’save as’) login.txt and place it in your gallery directory. Click Authenticate Me. Then press the Continue to Step 2 button.
   • Click Continue to Step 3 button.
     
   • Standard installation is selected by default. Click Continue to Step 4 button.
   • Ensure that the correct data directory path is present in Directory path field. Click Save button. Click Continue to Step 5 button.
   • Enter MySQL database information and click Save button. Click Continue to Step 6 button.
   • Enter your desired Gallery’s admin username, password, email address and full name. Click Create button. Then continue to next step. Then continue to the 8th step, then to 9th step.
   • You may leave all the plugins checked. Click Activate Selected Modules.
   • You might notice in red color that a couple of modules like ImageMagick and URL Rewrite require additional configuration. We will configure these after finishing the installation. Click Continue to Step 10 button, then on the button to 11th step. Click on Go to my Gallery! button.

Post Install Administration

• Adminstering the Gallery is straight forward and intuitive. Log in as admin and you can start adding photos right away. However, you might want to edit album to rename it, give it a summary, enter keywords and a description. You can also edit permissions to control who can view/add/comment. Remember that you can add unlimited number of sub albums.
• Most blog templates will have space for 500px wide images. So if you would like to post images on your blog, you might want to set this in your Gallery:

  Edit the main parent album, and add your target size under the Resized Images section. Tick Use these target sizes in all subalbums. Press the Save button. For example, entering 500×500 will produce a 500px wide copy of the uploaded image if the width is >= 500 px and will produce a 500px tall image if the height of the uploaded image is >=500px.

  

• By default, Gallery has 3 user groups: Everybody, Registered Users and Site Admins. To edit/add these groups, go to Site Admin -> Groups.
• For shorter and search engine friendly URLs, Go to Site Admin -> Plugins. Click configure for URL Rewrite plugin. Click on Apache mod_rewrite. Now click the activate link.
• Configure ImageMagick. To test the pre-set directory to IM binaries, click the Test Settings button. Once the test results indicate Passed, save the settings. Then activate.
• You can extend Gallery through several plugins. Some useful ones are:
  1. Registration: New User Registration
  2. Captcha: Prevents abuse by deterring automated bots with input that requires visual comprehension
  3. Members: Members List and Profiles
  4. User Albums: Create an album for each new user
  5. Cart: Shopping Cart Module
  6. Flash Video: Enable display of Flash video files
  7. MP3 Audio: Enable inline play of mp3 audio files with a flash player
  8. ImageFrame: Render frames around images
  9. Sitemap: Generate a Google Sitemap for your Gallery
  10. RSS: RSS Feed
  11. Add Items: Add items from local server or the web (i.e., you specify a directory path and Gallery will automatically import photos from it. You can simply upload the images via FTP)
  12. Picasa: Import for Picasa 2 XML-Exports
  13. Publish XP: Publish photos to Gallery directly from Windows XP
  14. Upload Applet: Easy to use upload applet for media (drag images from your computer and drop on the gallery to upload)

You don’t have to stick to using the web interface to get your images into Gallery! There are lots of other tools available that make it even easier to get your photos on to and off of your website running Gallery. Take a look at this page. The easiest and fastest way to manage your Gallery and to upload media to it is using Gallery Remote. It’s a client-side Java application that provides users with a rich front-end to their Gallery. You can download the windows program by going here. The Remote Module has to be enabled for this to work.

If you find this tutorial helpful, consider digging it. Finally, a question: Flickr or your own hosted photos solution? What do you prefer? Let us know your views by commenting.