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.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.