Linux Multimedia Hacks

Host a Photo Gallery

Use Gallery to easily thumbnail, label, and organize your photos into galleries—all from a web interface.

Photo albums have a long tradition of reminding us of special family moments as well as embarrassing a family member in front of their significant other. As nice as they are, photo albums have some problems. For one, photos degrade over time. For another, if a family is spread out geographically, it can be difficult to share photos without making multiple prints.

Of course, in the age of the Internet and digital cameras, you can simply move your photos away from a physical album into a digital one stored on the Web. This way you can share photos with family and friends no matter where they are, plus they can flip through the album at their leisure and download copies of the photos all on their own. There are a number of tools out there, both commercial and free, to help you manage your digital photo album, but one particularly nice project for Linux, Gallery, makes managing a number of photo galleries simple to set up, simple to administer, and simple for everyone to view.

The Gallery project home is located at http://gallery.menalto.com. The site itself is a great resource, with extensive documentation and a number of sample sites so you can see how others have used Gallery. To install Gallery, you must first meet a few requirements:

Web server

Gallery is a web-based application and as such it requires a web server to host it. Apache is the preferred web server ...