Create Online Photo Albums with Web Album Generator

I have recently begun to move all my photos from Flickr back to my own website. I was encouraged to begin this huge task when I was introduced to the freeware program Web Album Generator.

I figured this would be a good time to introduce it to Make Use Of readers, what with the holidays approaching and your photo-taking likely to increase.

If you maintain a website, you more than likely have more space on that site than you know what to do with. So why not use some of it to host your photos? If they are on your own site, you have total control over them and you don’t have to worry about a photo-hosting site going out of business anytime soon. What stopped me up to now from doing it was not being able to find a simple enough program. However, when I was emailed the link to Web Album Generator, it was love at first sight.

Web Album Generator doesn’t involve any specialised knowledge of HTML or CSS. Even the biggest technophobe in the world could work it. All you do is point and click. The program does the rest for you. I can’t believe such a great program is free. This is something I would seriously consider paying for if the inventor decided to start charging for it.

The first step, after installing and opening it, is to click on the link for “add photos” :

The Windows Explorer box will then come up and you can select the photos that you want to appear in your new web gallery.

You can then rename the photos to give them better titles and you also have the option to write descriptive captions. This is a good thing to do from a search engine optimization point of view (if you want your photos appearing in Google or Yahoo).

When the photos have been uploaded and you’ve given them their descriptive titles and captions, you now have to customize the page background. In a very straight-forward process, it will ask you for a title of the page (again very important if you want the page to appear prominently in search engine results), a description and a page colour. You also have to specify the size of the thumbnails and the size of each photograph when someone clicks on it. You can even insert a link to another webpage (especially good if you have a central photo catalogue on your site and you want everything to be connected). When the process is finished, the entire web album is then saved to your computer.

To transfer the album to your website, you will need a FTP program such as Filezilla. When you have moved everything over, you should then have something like this.

Does anyone have an alternative web album generator program that they would like to share?

Filed Under: Cool Software Apps
Tags: ftp client, photo albums, photo sharing, photos