Photo album software recommendations?

Software 1 Minute

I need some recommendations. I have a retired friend who is about as non-technical as a person can get. He loves his digital camera, though, and he’s a social animal. Every time he goes to a party or on a trip with his many friends he snaps a lot of photos. For the past few years, he’s been creating photo albums with PrintMaster, printing them out using his high-end inkjet printer, and giving them away.

But now he wants to take those phot albums online instead. He has an account with a very good Web hosting company and he owns his own domain. What he’d like to do is:

  1. Pick a group of photos to use for an album.
  2. Add titles and captions.
  3. Upload the album to his Web space.
  4. Put a link on his home page.
  5. Tell all his friends to go check his Web page to see the pictures.

Ideally, he wants something that can handle all these tasks from a single place. He doesn’t want to learn HTML (and I don’t want to answer the 10,000 questions he would have if he tried). He can handle FTP if it’s automated but please – no command lines. Being able to put the pictures on his own domain is important, so forget about any of the commercial photo-hosting services.

What would you recommend?

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Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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13 thoughts on “Photo album software recommendations?”

  1. HP has a pretty nice Web service called HPPhoto.com. It’s free, and you don’t need to be using any HP imaging products to use it. There’s an HP Photo Manager program available for download from there. It does all the things you listed, including being able to invite people to look at your images.

    Picasa 2.0 from Google also is pretty groovy, and it does work with photo hosting service, though I’ve never used that part of it. Picasa is extremely slick and easier to use than the HP Photo Manager software. But I really do like the HPPhoto.com Web service.

  4. Hi Ed! Remember me? I miss you on About.com, but was glad to have found your blog. For your friend, I have listings and reviews of web gallery programs here.

    Several of the free ones are very good. link

    JAlbum is my favorite—lots of options—but not as easy to use as the web gallery creator in Photoshop Elements. I’m pretty sure JAlbum has built-in FTP capabilities. Unfortunately Elements doesn’t have built-in FTP, but once you configure an FTP client, it’s as easy as drag and drop. For myself, I use Photoshop Elements most of the time because that’s where I do all my photo organizing and editing. If he’s looking for a great organizer and editor in addition to doing the photo galleries, he really should look into Photoshop Elements 3. I’m working on a free class for it on About.com too.

    Picasa is nice. Not my personal favorite, but its free, easy to use, and can do all that your friend wants. Pretty limited in Web gallery designs, though, if I recall correctly. Picasa also integrates with Blogger.com, so if he wanted to set up a blog on his domain, it makes a real easy way to put pictures online (after the initial setup).

    Hope this is helpful! Have him visit my forum if he still needs help deciding.

  7. I don’t know of there just being one program that could do all of that, but Picasa would be able to do the first 2 and Web Album Generator from ornj.net could do #3. Don’t know about 4 and 5.

    Unless he had a Blogger blog on his domain, in which case Picasa might be able to do more.

  8. Sue Chastain’s comments on Picasa2 are accurate, but the ease of creating a web site may not be obvious to a first time user. Here is a mini tutorial.

    We’ll assume that Picasa2 is installed and has been given time to create a library of all the photos on you system.

    Start Picasa2.

    Browse for a photo you want to put in an album.

    (If the photos have meaningful names or if they have been organized into folders with meaningful names, just type a meaningful word into search box near the upper right of Picasa2 window to narrow the list of thumbnails you’re browsing.)

    When you find a photo you want to include, select it. Click the Label button (near the bottom left) and choose New Label from the pop-up menu. (At this point New Label is the only item on the pop-up menu.) The “Name” and “Description” will appear on the albums thumbnail page. “Name” will also appear with each photo in the album.

    Browse for additional photos. As they are found; select them; click the Label button and use your recently created label.

    When you’re done selecting photos, scroll to the top of the navigation list (left of the thumbnails) and select the label you created for this album.

    In the thumbnail display, drag the thumbnails into the order you want them to appear on the web page. When you’re finished, double click on the first image in the group.

    You’re now in edit view and the “Make a caption” field is already active – just start typing and press Enter when finished.

    When the insertion point is not blinking (initially and after pressing Enter), you can use the right/left arrow keys to navigate to the next/previous photo. Again just start typing to add/edit captions.

    Finished captioning the photos? Click the “Back to Library” button (upper left) and make the following two menu selections.
    Edit> Clear Selection Ctrl+D
    Label> Export as Web Page… Ctrl+W

    Look for the exported web page in
    My Documents\Picasa Web Exports

    Picasa2 uses CSS. So NVU ( http://nvu.com/ ) makes a good companion product.

  10. Bob Dietz, you are a total treasure. Thank you for thinking about the complete non-technical first time Picasa user. That was an awesome explanation. Where else can I go online to find very simple step by step instructions on how to create a web-page from start to finish?
    JLong.

  12. The web templates of Picasa are quite… rubish! And 3rd
    party ones like PiPiView (pipiview.companje.nl/) or
    SimpleViewer (www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/) only work with Flash… I’m a fundamentalist, so no other
    than W3C standard! I guess I’m going to make some template
    look-a-like of the flikr (www.flickr.com) slideshow…
    Or does anybody know of 3rd party HTML templates for Picasa?

    Pete

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