Nice photo hosting solution if you want to run things yourself (gallery.menalto.com)

Member Name: non_sense

Product:	gallery.menalto.com
Date:	31/10/08 (279 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You have control

Disadvantages: You have to perform upgrades and installations yourself

In a world with the likes of Facebook, Picasa, Flickr and other fantastic photo sharing websites, why would you want to do it all yourself? Well not everyone has a Facebook account to look at your photos and other websites have a limit on how many photos you can upload.

I've been using gallery for 4 years, my installation is only a personal photo site but it lets me share all the photos from my travels with family and friends. It's hosted on my own domain so it's easy for everyone to remember (and I'm always happy to remind them whether they want to see them or not!)

Gallery is an open source product, it won't cost you anything to use it but it's nice to make a contribution to the developers if you can :-)

To install it you'll need a web server running PHP 4.3.0 or higher and a database (MySQL for mine).

Gallery has a crazy number of plugins and customisations to provide all manner of functionality and allow you to change the way it looks and behaves. Personally I just have a simple, clean looking page with pages of photo albums. Photos and albums can be tagged for searching, permissions can be set so people can be forced to log in to see pictures you don't want left available to the world. Users can also be created so multiple people can host their albums in your Gallery installation.

If you already have web hosting and want a more customisable photo solution I really recommend taking a look, if however you're unlikely to upload more than a couple of GB of photos or have time to do some customisation, stick with Picasa and Flickr.

Summary: Not for those that want simple photo hosting