best professional web gallery

**ShuckyD** · September 9th, 2008, 08:50 PM

I have been fiddling for some time with what I would like to use to create my photography gallery, both for my personal work and professional work. For a few months I have been playing with Gallery2, which was created for photo sharing galleries and seems to be pretty cool. It's nice to be able to password protect certain folders and so on.

Anyway I want to make it look very sleak and I was looking over a javascript to run on the page called Lightbox which actually looks pretty cool. Anyway I've been trying to get some themes (from Gallery2) to work with it. Now that Adobe released Lightroom 2 I just downloaded the demo this morning and have been playing with it a little. I didnt like Lightroom when it first came out, so I just kept with Photoshop CS3 for my photo work, but this new version looks pretty promising. I also see they have a publish/web galley feature which looks very professional and also very sleak (does sorta what Lightbox does) but I haven't seen some of the higher end things like being able to password protect folders and so on.

Anyone have any experience with setting up a photo gallery site and/or with Lightroom's Web Gallery or Gallery2? I'm looking to see what others here use or have worked with and would recommend. I want a professional looking page for my on portfolio and studio work, but I still want to have a password protected area that if I go to an event I can upload the photos to that folder and then give people the password, etc...

Any suggestions?

**ShuckyD** · September 11th, 2008, 01:04 PM

bump...

**DoubleK** · September 11th, 2008, 01:30 PM

Have you ever looked into what your host offers Shucky?

I have seen some very nice flash based portfolios but imagine this route to be very expensive and lack some of the control you mention without very creative scripting.

This is probably a stupid question but have you ever looked into Zenphoto, Pixelpost or Coppermine?

I essentially wanted to do the same thing but got busier in the other avenues in life that actually make money.

I have BlueHost for another 2 weeks and am willing to give you the login credentials and play with any of these 3 solutions. I believe it is quite simple to set up now with simple scripts? Like I said lack of time but if yours looks good I will extend my hosting contract and give you shell over your own domain if you need a host? I have three domains I thought I would use more and I plan on letting all three wither unless i can somehow justify, lol.

**ShuckyD** · September 11th, 2008, 03:35 PM

haha I have BlueHost's sister company (HostMonster) and have a couple domains hosted with them. Essentially I want a place that I can easily and quickly upload a job's photos to a gallery and have the user access them by a password so they can view them and order the sizes/prints they want. alot of this functionality is built into Gallery2, which makes that a good choice for this part....

But.... I also want a place to post my own portfolio photos, of different kinds of jobs, nature, studio, portraits, etc... and of course they will all be my best photos with rights (and watermarks over them) to use them as such, and I am looking at Photoshop CS3 and/or Lightroom 2 for that purpose. I just dont know if they are for "one up" galleries where I just create them and post the files generated by either Photoshop or Lightroom via FTP to my site. I would rather have an ongoing flow of images/photos being able to be posted to my main part of the site. I want to be able to add a few portraits, then when I get some more, add some more, etc.

Ohh and not to mention I really like the Lightbox effect that I can use (googled it) which would add another dimension to my photo gallery. I have looked into a little of what cPanel/Hostmonster has to offer, but looked more into Gallery2 and other kinds of things like that.

Does anyone actually have a photo gallery created from either Photoshop, Lightroom, or Gallery2 that they continually update and like?

**TheMagic** · January 25th, 2011, 07:55 AM

I know this thread is quite old now, but if it's of any help I found 350's gallery feature damn useful. It bypasses the need for any offline setup or coding as it resizes and distributes your images in a variety of ways for you. Even the uploader will resize the images for you if you ask it to.