Margaret’s 3rd year journalism blog

New Tools: Free Photo Gallery Tools

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, one of the strengths of the web, is the ability to upload photo galleries. This enables news agencies to depict stories more effectively through a series of frames. Some Flash photo gallery sites have galleries that are appropriate for embedding onto a news website, not simply for networking sites such as MySpace.

Sites such as Slide, Picasa, Picture Trail, BubbleShare and SlideFlickr will do the job. However, as Robert Niles notes in Which is the best free photo gallery editor? Part two, they have varying functions, levels of flexibility and simplicity.

In most cases, you can simply bulk upload your pictures into an album and then the images will run in that order in a slideshow.

He labelled Picasa the number one performer. To upload images, one can choose either a bulk upload interface or five at a time. This site is easy to use and allows you to choose the from five different gallery sizes and add captions.

Slide also allows the user to do all of these things, but he only recommends Slide over Picasa if the gallery sizes available are not suitable.

For Picture Trail he noted that the user has to go through a convoluted process and be bombarded with advertising to register, and for Niles, the process was too tedious to see through to the end.

The highlights for Bubbleshare are its quick image upload function and its more simple registration process. However, Niles wasn’t impressed by the gallery editing which automatically named photos, placed them in the wrong order and offered less gallery size options than Picasa.