Is this software for me?This photo gallery software has been created to solve a particular need: 

People who need a first class photo gallery at a very affordable price that simple works out of the box, offering an outstanding photo viewer performance, that can be configured in 5 minutes, and works just reading your current file system photo folder structure. 

Also author and visitors comments, EXIF information, dynamic photo resizing, fast square thumbnails, RSS feeds for comments, ZIP and download functionality, are nice to have. 

And having a 15 days no question asked refund policy helps to make the decision…

What are the server requirements?

• ASP/VBScript support (that’s pretty obvious), so you will need a Windows SO (Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2008 Server, etc)
• Microsoft JET Engine (for MS Access database).
• CDONTS or CDOSYS.
• .NET Framework 2.0 installed, if you want to use real time generated thumbnails and EXIF functionality
• Write permissions in order to write thubmnails in cache, write into the database, and persist author comments,

Why is this gallery faster than others?

• The viewer doesn’t have to render the whole page to display each image. The image is loaded using AJAX.
• The viewer is caching thumbnails on disk so they only have to be generated once (it caches also different sizes of thumbnails)
• The viewer has smart pre-loading technology so it loads the following image when you are enjoying the previous, so it doesn’t have to be fetched from the server when you request it, since it has been already downloaded.

[go top]How does the gallery work (overview)?

• It uses the filesystem object to create a dynamic HTML image catalogue with the pictures found in the folder(s) specified.
• It works in a recursive way by indexing all folders and subfolders and creating an usable javascript with that folder hierarchy.
• It uses AJAX, so every request is processed on the background. This translates into fast operation and responsive interface.
• It also uses smart caching techology. Thumbnails are cached on disk for further processing
• How do I (the author) add comments to the pictures?You can create author comments to each picture creating a text file with the same name as the picture and the extension .txt, and the script will look for that file and write the content of that file in the screen.

Ex: To create a author comment entry for the picture me_in_the_park.jpg located on the folder /images/me/, just create a file called me_in_the_park.txt with your comments, and place it on /images/me

You can do this manually, or you can log in as administrator and click on the “edit” link, located under “author comments” area. You will be able to edit HTML comments. HTML will be rendered as you type.

More information in the documentation files.

What is that squared thumbnails thing?

Generating a nice thumbnails collection for pictures with both portrait and landscape orientation is a quite painful task.

By having the squared thumbnailing feature, your thumbnail collection will look always nice and compact, no matter how non-proportional the pictures are. See example:

[go top]Is there a way to control access to the gallery?

Yes, you can set a configuration variable to define if anynonymous visitors are allowed. If they are not, you need to log in as administrator and create an account for each user you want to have access to the gallery. 

You can define permissions for that account, so it will be able to write comments or not.

[go top]What exactly can I configure?

• Email where comment notification are going to be sent to
• Valid image extensions
• Valid video extensions
• Whenever empty folders will be displayed or not
• Whenever the visitor is going to be able to change the number of pictures per row
• Obscure email (to avoid SPAM spiders) or displaing it in plain text
• Folder filter (folders matching that pattern won’t be displayed)
• File filter (the same applied to images and videos)
• Enabled/disable ZIP and download functionality
• Enable/disable main tree cache
• Chose cosmetic items and images (folders, plus, minus icons, etc)
• Number of recent commments to be displayed
• CSS theme to be used
• Video size
• Main image available display sizes
• Main image default display size
• Thumbnail configuration: Enabled/disabled, thumbnail sized, square thumbnails allows, show thumbnail in arrows, etc.
• Security configuration: Enable anonymous visitors, enable anonymous to read and/or post comments, etc.