I've been spending a large amount of time over the past few weeks designing a website with a focus on photography.  I have several requirements, such as being easy to update, having a simple database, sporting a clean design, as well as displaying only photo content.  What's not on my list is just as important as what is.  I don't want, tagging, comments, blog; any content other than pictures.  But of all the site requirements, the most important is the ease of update, which means I want as automated a process as possible to upload photo galleries.

At first I had 2 choices: I could build the system myself, or I could look for an existing solution.  Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, and lacking any motivation to code from scratch what I was certain already existed, I started rooting about the web for a good application to create my galleries.  I decided any gallery generator should meet certain criteria:

• It must be an off line generator.  I'm not fond of maintaining a dynamic gallery, and prefer the ability to package a gallery, and treat that as a site object, which meant an offline application to generate the gallery.
• It must output pages with my choice of file extension.  I want PHP files, and although I don't want a dynamic online system, the site is PHP and integration is important.
• It must be template based.
• It must resize images and create thumbnails by itself, to my specifications.
• All photos must be on my server only.

My first thought was to look at Adobe Lightroom.  I use Lightroom to organize my images, so it seemed logical to me that I'd do best if I could use the Web module to create my gallery.  It failed on all but the first count.  It is an offline generator, but does not allow me to change the file extension (I only get *.html files) so no PHP, and it's not template based.  One can create a custom template for Lightroom, but it's not simple and requires a snowstorm of XML config files, plus XSLT to create the final output.  It's not that XSLT is bad necessarily (a disappointment maybe, but not bad), it's just not my tool for this simple job.

Then I began to search for other solutions.  Of course, the online galleries such as Flickr were out because the require my pictures reside on their servers.  Other systems, such as Zenphoto (an excellent PHP photo gallery) were server side applications where I upload photos via a browser based admin interface and it creates galleries on the fly.

I was really tempted to use Zenphoto, or use it as a starting point and modify it to my own use, but I really prefer not to have a server side solution.  I don't want to have to protect an admin page which grants dangerous access to my content and database.  This only provides an unnecessary attack vector, and I choose peace of mind over possible security concern.  Plus, I don't want the images to be central to the site.  I want each gallery package to be an individual unit, instead of a dynamically generated collection of individual units.

So I kept looking and found little that met my requirements.  Many of the tools I tried fell short on one or more points and I'm not yet willing to compromise.  Some output beautiful, valid XHTML code, with no way to customize to a useful degree.  Others provided no template mechanism, just some built in themes.  Most are quite useful for sharing family photos or vacation shots, but not as the workhorse of a commercial photography website.

I finally demoed Extreme Thumbnail Generator from Extreme Internet Software.  This tool hit the mark on the template requirement, and has enough options to allow me almost full control over gallery generation.  I'm not that pleased to see output in HTML tables, but I can work around that and apply my own style.  I was able to get gallery templates built, configured, saved, and have a gallery generated that integrates perfectly with my PHP site in about an hour and a half.  After a few more tweaks and tests, I was gladly filling out a purchase form for a full license.

My one frustration came in trying to set up the thumbnail page menu bars.  I want the menu bar to show, in order, a link to the first page, a link to the previous page, a link to each page by number, a link to the next page, and a link to the last page.  ETG did everything but the numbered links.  From a usability standpoint, this would have been a showstopper for me, but they do provide a variety of template tags, page count among them, that I can generate number links with just a few lines of PHP script.

I've now got a solution that works, and has enough flexibility to provide me enough room to grow over time as the site (like all eventually do) expands.  I'm able to upload the gallery folder, add the details to the database using the MySQL query tool, and let the site take care of the rest.  Now, on to building the other pages.  Will have code samples up soon, along with links to new site when live.