How to make a personal photo-sharing site

Mech_Engineer

Hi all, this seems like the best area for this question.

I have a personal website for my wife and I that we don't do much with these days, I'd kind of like to turn it into a family photo-sharing site that my wife and I can use to upload pictures for our extended family to look at and download if desired. Ideally, I would like to make it so uploads can be done on the site directly with an admin login, my wife uses Shutterfly right now so the closer to Shutterfly's interface the better...

What are the relatively painless options out there? I'd probably be willing to pay under $100 for a pre-packaged interface (Flash, HTML5, whatever) if it was really slick. I have experience installing/running my own phpBB forums and some basic Java and HTML programming, but I can't build this kind of thing from scratch if you know what I mean. I have Dreamweaver if that helps/hurts.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.

rcgldr

Filezilla is a free FTP transfer program, but the users would have to learn how to use it, since it's not a browser. It's similar to having two windows explorer windows open at ths same time, and you just use drag and drop to upload or download files.

Mech_Engineer

Sure FTP is ok for moving bulk files, but it doen't show previews of pictures, and doesn't allow you to give context to a group of pictures like a photo-sharing site might.

What we want is basically Shutterfly or Facebook photo sharing, on our website (with full-res downloads available when logged-in). I'm sure there's got to be some kind of interface you can buy that provides this functionality.

rcgldr

You could just have the users switch between two applications, one for viewing, one for transferring files. The free photosharing sites are OK, but they generally pester you with ads and want email addresses to send spam to all the viewers.

You're probably correct in there's probably some client / server app that combines photo sharing, viewing, grouping, and transfer feature that will work with a cheap web hosting service, but I"m not aware of any.

jhae2.718

There are a couple of open source photo gallery projects out there, but I have no experience with them. Doing a Google search for "open source photo gallery" brought a project called Gallery as the first result that might suit your needs.

MATLABdude

A few of my semi-pro photographer friends use Flickr / MobileMe / Picasa for their image hosting / sharing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...aring_websites

We used to use PHP Album, but the first version contained a bug that, partnered with the older version of PHP the server used, allowed a Russian "pharmacy" to operate on our server for a while (then IT noticed quite a bit of odd behaviour and pulled the plug). That's been patched, but the lesson here is that, no matter what you use, you have to stay vigilant.

Mech_Engineer

Thanks guys, those two projects look like a good start for what I'm after!

Feel free to chime in if you find anything else

Mech_Engineer

I'm trying out Coppermine gallery for a start, we'll see how it goes. Coppermine has a nice set of pre-made themes that look pretty slick and seem easy to configure...

http://coppermine-gallery.net/