It seems every few months I always find myself trying to find a good open source photo gallery, since I know I will never have the time to make one. All I want in my gallery is three things: flexibility, fast load time, and visual look that isn’t terrible. You wouldn’t think that it would be that hard to find one that meets these requirements, but in reality they are next to impossible to find.

I recently found PostcardViewer which isn’t quite open source, but is pretty great if you don’t mind the way that it looks out of the box. I haven’t had a use for it yet, but I think we’ll get around to it someday.

If you know you are going to have a bunch of large images Flash Image Gallery seems to be the way to go. It works well for showing large things in a limited amount of space and for giving multiple viewing options. That being said, I don’t really think I’d use it for most sites because it doesn’t seem that easy to incorporate into an overall site design.

Ever since the Adobe Spry came out we’ve been pretty excited about using some of their “easy to use AJAX” features. If you look at their demo section, their photo gallery hasn’t really reached its full potential yet, but in time I think it will be pretty awesome. Loading images from XML, not needing flash, and being able to customize the look make this gallery worth the time it will take you to figure it out.

I know this isn’t everything great out there, but this should at least get you started. Don’t forget to let us know if you come across something worthwhile. It will save me some time in two months when I have to look again.

Will 2008 be the year that making your site viewable on mobile devices becomes truly important? Up until now there haven’t been enough users to warrant giving much thought to the mobile phone market, but with the innovative iPhone and the continuing rise of Blackberry users, it may be time to get on the bandwagon. Sites that appeal to users on the go are going to see the most mobile traffic but most web analysts agree that everyone across the board will start to see more hits from these devices.

The main challenge of designing your web content so that it will be compatible with mobile devices is that the screens are just so darn small. Devices like the iPhone have interfaces that simply shrink down web pages so they fit on the screen, but since many phones display web pages differently it can be hard to make your site work for devices without making an entirely separate site.

Some web designers have had success adding mobile device specific style sheets that remove most formatting, since that’s where mobile browsers have the most trouble displaying things. This however does not solve the problem of images since many phones do not display images by default.

Bigger companies like Flickr and Google have created separate sites that dispense with virtually all formatting, just giving their users the content that they desire. In the game of who can display the information the fastest, this approach is the best for the end user. If mobile users are a big part of your target market, this seems to be the way to go.

Want to know more? You may want to read Mobile Web Design, a new book by Cameron Moll.

If that book seems like too much for now, here are some of Moll’s blog posts about this very subject from 2005. Authentic Boredom presents: Mobile Web Design

Last but not least, Google Mobile Proxy is a neat tool to see how your website will probably appear on a mobile device.