I have some experience with this plugin, though I haven’t worked with the newest incarnation. I assume it’s gotten better and more feature rich.
http://www.yellowswordfish.com/index.php?pagename=popup-image-gallery-plugin
I like MyGallery. I have it running on 3 different sites. There is a slight learning curve to using it but basically it works like this:
1. from the admin you can upload a zip folder of your images (example: Tahiti.zip of 30 photos)
2. once it’s done uploading MyGallery will unzip the folder and create thumbnails based on the options you’ve selected in the admin. Options include things like, “make thumbnails a specific width in pixels and scale the height”. Another option allows you to keep your pics at their original res but scale them when they appear in the page. This helps pics fit your theme design, but can mean longer page loads. Another option allows you to hide the thumbnails when you look at a large photo (with prev/next “buttons” to click through) or always keep the thumbnails visible with the big pic.
3. clicking on the big pic will either open the original photo in its own page, or use a javascript plugin to put the fullsize pic over your page and dim out everything else. As far as I know a direct link to the pic itself would be the directory of your site, but a link to the post with the gallery would follow your permalinks.
4. once your gallery is loaded you can go into the admin and add text that displays for each individual photo. You can also exclude photos from the gallery without deleting them. You can also select a default pic for your gallery for when you make a page of all your galleries (haven’t tried this feature yet).
The issues I’ve had is that you must chmod MyGallery’s image (called “myfotos”) folder to 777 for it to create thumbnails and load your zipped folders. There are 2 different commands for adding a gallery to a page and adding one to a post, that confused me. The documentation is in German so there are many “features” that I am still working out, like an add-random-pic-to-sidebar that doesn’t work for me…. The convenient thing is the gallery takes the name of the zip folder so calling the gallery is pretty easy. You can call specific pics to appear in your text too, but I haven’t done that either.
Anyway, with all the gallery plugins out there but this is the one I got working and I’m happy with it. The author seems to be actively working on updates, and I’ve been able to teach my authors how to use it.
http://www.wildbits.de/mygallery/
“Popup Image Gallery” (mentioned above) is nice, but has anyone figured out how to make an image stay visible AFTER mousing off the thumb?
“MyGallery” (also mentioned above) is also very nice, but the image replaces the thumbs (more page refreshes).
“PixGallery”
http://www.nathanm.com/index.php/pixgallery/
makes a fake pop-up window, so the thumbs are still there (no refresh).
“SimpleViewer” is a nice-ish Flash thing:
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/
which I like because you can see both thumbs and image at the same time. I’m trying to figure out how to customize it…
I like Popup Image Gallery but I was wondering about that too — making the larger image stay when clicking on the thumb.
Holly — do you have a link to MyGallery in use on your site, so I can see it in action?
I’m looking into the others now — thanks Jim.
“SimpleViewer” – mentioned above is the easiest to use when integrated with Google’s Picasa (free photo viewer/editor).
From airtightinteractive dot com’s website, you can download the web template for use with Picasa. This is a one-time setup process (w/c is basically extracting the archive into the Picasa templates directory).
Here’s the process afterwards:
1. Open Picasa and select the photos you want to publish on your site, and click FOLDER > Export as a Web Page (CTRL+W).
2. Customize as per your preference, and click next then finish.
3. Upload the entire folder created and link it to your blog.
Short and sweet!
Not a big fan of flash — too fancy. I’m minimalistic, and also all my photos are currently store in Flickr.
This might be what you want then — http://blog.borgnet.us/2006/03/07/lazy-gallery/ — Its a drop in plug that uses a page for the gallery. Resizes the pictures for a thumb and you can use your own directories for pictures.
http://www.plogger.org
It’s a beta version which will eventually have wordpress plugin, but it’s already very mature and it’s simple to integrate. Just duplicate your template, insert three lines of code and it’s ready to use.
This is my own: http://www.spoenk.nl (click on ‘Fotografie’ at the top to see the integration), but look also in the forum of plogger.org to see what can be done.
It’s really simple, looks great and it’s clean and fast.
Plogger looks nice the way you have it integrated. Is that the default installation? I’m thinking of the effect when I click on one of your photos. It jumps out nicely and stays like that until I de-select it. Is that a hack from your side?
AD
I’ve used lazy-gallery with the re-launch (yesterday so probably teething problems still) of my site.
Matches most of your criteria although i’m having an issue listing the folders in the order i want.
Example: http://www.galaharriers.com/photo-gallery/
Do any of these allow people to comment on the photos? I already pay for hosting, so paying for Flickr seems like a waste of all my server space. I’m looking to transition to having photos strictly on my site instead of using an outside site. However, flickr does offermost of what I want.
Okay, you guys SOLD! me on Plogger. It’s up and running now and I’ll spend the next few hours making look like the rest of my site.
For future Plogger users:
I already had the php-exec plugin working on my site, so all I did was create a new page and post the three lines of plogger code into the text of that page in order to get a direct link to my gallery.
Like a charm. Thanks to everyone who gave me their recommendations.
Sorry, let me clarify what I wrote above. Inputting the Plogger code into the page DOES NOT do anything. In a stroke of accidental genius, I created a page with the same slug as the folder where I installed plogger. So there are two duplicate permalinks that *should* go to two different places, but they don’t.
This means the page link shows up with my other pages in list_pages, but due to the server hierarchy, it actually links to the plogger folder, instead of the page. In the long run it works out perfectly.
Anyone who wants to see can go here.
AdventureDad (and others who are interested),
The popup effect will be one of the ‘themes’ available inside Plogger when it is released officially. I’m using one of the nightlies at the moment. The script being used is ‘lightbox’. I believe someone even made a kind of plugin to use this kind of popup from within posts for images.
