Graphics

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I’m an avid digital photographer. I’ve tried many online photo storage accounts in the past and finally settled on a Flickr Pro account, allowing me to store virtually unlimited photos at their highest resolution. I also have a number of other accounts, such as Shutterpoint and PhotoBox where people can purchase my photos.

All of these services, whilst good, don’t really offer me the flexibility I’m after, which is why I took a look at Gallery 2. Gallery 2 is a hosted PHP application, so you’ll need your own server or hosting account. I set mine up using my Dreamhost account. Installation was a breeze, as Dreamhost offer a “One Click” installation as part of their standard package. During setup, you’re advised of any potential issues before installation starts. The Gallery 2 web site has a Certified Hosts section, which details those hosts known to work well with Gallery 2.

After the initial installation, I was somewhat bewildered by the array of options available. I had a few specific requirements for my new Gallery as follows:

• I wanted to change the logo on the header page
• I wanted to disallow anyone to register for the site (i.e. allow visitors to view the albums, but not add or alter them), as I want to host purely my own work (you can, if you wish, allow anyone to register and create their own albums)
• I wanted to allow visitors to purchase my photos via PayPal
• I wanted to change the default “look and feel” of the gallery

A quick search of the forum revealed that I could do all of the above, and just about anything else! This is obviously a labour of love to the authors and everyone who has contributed to it and this is demonstrated by the wealth of detail provided in the forums and the online documentation.

There are a number of methods you can use to upload photos to your server. I tried the ftp upload first, where you simply upload the photos to a directory you create on the server, tell Gallery 2 where they are, and it will upload them to the selected album. You can create multiple albums, each with their own defaults, such as maximum image size, maximum file size etc. You can also apply global defaults, such as applying your own watermark to each image. The second method I tried was using a downloadable Java application called Gallery Remote. This allows you to connect to your Gallery via the application and drag and drop images to it, applying captions etc. This makes it an absolute breeze to get the photos into your album. The only short-coming with this method is that you have to manually apply watermarks once the images have uploaded. I may be missing something here, but a quick forum search revealed others are having to do the same. A relatively minor omission that I’m sure will be addressed at some future stage.

The standard installation (as supplied by Dreamhost) allows a number of options for visitors, such as voting and adding remarks. The gallery can then be extended by using any of the enormous number of plug-in modules available for Gallery 2. To install one, you simply copy it into a new directory on the server. Then go to Modules under Site Admin and configure it as required. You then Activate it and it’s available. I used this method to add the “pay by PayPal” and “Contact” modules to my own gallery.

You can set individual permissions for each album if required, set different permission levels for different groups etc. It really is incredibly configurable. It took me around 1 complete day in total to get my gallery up and running as it is now. Given the cost of the application (free!) and its functionality, I’d say this is a very good investment. You can see my finished gallery here. I’ve still some work to do with it, but I’m now happy with its overall appearance.

I’ll still use Flickr for fun, but I shall most likely be dropping my use of the other services and using Gallery 2 for my “serious” stuff.

If you’re a photographer looking for a home on the web for your images, or you want to create an album for your family, I’d strongly recommend Gallery 2.

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I love applications that allow me to get the job done quickly and easily. Paint.Net is one of those applications. There are some great commercial graphics applications available, but I don’t use a great deal of their features and it’s often hard to work out how to use the ones I need.

Paint.Net makes it really easy to get all of the stuff done that probably the vast majority of us need to do, i.e. image resizing, photo finishing (red eye removal, etc).

I’ve used Paint.Net to resize the images shown on this (and other) page. One of the things I really like is the “Quality” option when saving an image as a JPG. You can adjust the Quality slider and visually check the resulting image before committing to the save. It also shows the resulting file size, which is very useful. There are lots of nice ideas like this that make it a joy to use.

It’s got some nice effects you can apply to your image, such as Frosted Glass, Oil Painting etc. I’ve seem some commercial applications going for big bucks that are purely made to apply such effects to images and some of them don’t even do it as well as Paint.Net.

As quoted on their web site, “It started development at Washington State University as an undergraduate senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with a small amount of C++ for setup and shell-integration related functionality.”.

You can set an option to auto-check for updates each time the application starts, or do a manual check whenever you please. Updates appear to come along every 1-2 weeks.

In short, everything I need to do on a day-to-day basis with images can be accomplished with this application. I paid for my version of Paint Shop Pro. When I bought my new laptop, I didn’t bother re-installing it, but installed Paint.Net. I can’t offer a better recommendation than that.

 
The main screen, with a blank canvas

 
A “Frosted Glass” version of “Bliss”

 
And an “Oil Painting” version