Do's and Don'ts of creating a web gallery

bogleric · Jun 19, 2006

I have recently been exploring methods to create an online gallery, specifically for customers to look at proofs, etc, and provide some level of protection for both their privacy (passwords) and image copyright.

I thought it might be interesting to hear everyone thoughts on the do's and don'ts. I am trying to stay away from commerical things like smugmug becuase I don't want it for photo printing, just a nice display. I have been experimenting with flash and dynamic pages.

Anyways, post your do's and don'ts, I am interested to hear what you have to rant and rave about

:cheers:

Waltonphotography · Jun 22, 2006

lol, well my first -must- would be,
you must not post full sized images..

if your printing them, selling them or just giving away desktops
you should never give away the full sized image and Always,
Always have a watermark / credits on your picture.

myself, for paying customers i create hidden folders
and all of my commercial gallerys (and the hidden ones)
have the "Swap Picture" trick from FrontPage..
yeah.. nearly any user with more then 6 to 9 months of computer use
could find away around it if they wanted.. but its still one more way
to stop the average, don't know anything about there computer theif..

Waltonphotography.

Ganoderma · Jun 25, 2006

don't copy and paste javascript on your page thinking it will stop copying or be a secure password protector

i like the hidden file way you do it. people will spend years making a program to crack security but wont spend 5 minutes trying to actually find something by looking :lol:

Je-C · Jun 25, 2006

Do look around at others' sites to get ideas to spark your own creativity!

Don't underestimate the power of print screen. Maybe you can disable right click, but unfortunately you can't disable print screen.

Do keep it simple. No wild background colors! (o:

bogleric · Jun 27, 2006

Those are some good do's. Does anyone have any suggestions as far as coding the page? Flash/ Java / Jscript, etc? There are a million ways to do this and I would prefer not to re-invent the wheel everytime.

bigfatbadger · Jun 27, 2006

Don't make it too flashy, only you will be impressed by that animation after the fifth time you have to watch it, everyone else will just get annoyed. Clean, simple good design is the way to go.

kbtarl · Jul 4, 2006

bogleric said:
I have recently been exploring methods to create an online gallery, specifically for customers to look at proofs, etc, and provide some level of protection for both their privacy (passwords) and image copyright.

I thought it might be interesting to hear everyone thoughts on the do's and don'ts. I am trying to stay away from commerical things like smugmug becuase I don't want it for photo printing, just a nice display. I have been experimenting with flash and dynamic pages.

Anyways, post your do's and don'ts, I am interested to hear what you have to rant and rave about

:cheers:

I have not done any coding myself. It was all I could do to get an HTML page up and use some third party gallery maker. SimpleViewer as a lot of other people are using. I recently ran across another thrid party software that creates the gallery and thumbnails for you as well as a shopping cart. My friend is a photographer in Houston who started out writing this for himself but it has grown into something he wants to share. There is a lite version for anyone that would like to check it out. ProofBuddy has password protection, transparency overlay and js to help with copyright protection. I have no connection with this software other than being a beta tester and will more than likely have it be my wife's proofing software. Check out if you are interested. The lite version is free and there is a free forum if you wish to participate.

Digital Matt · Jul 4, 2006

My only advice is:

Do use a program like Jalbum - www.jalbum.net

Je-C · Jul 5, 2006

I'm coding my own website. You can see the progression on the link in my sig. Anyway, I'm using HTML and CSS to do it all. It's taking a bit longer than I thought, but using CSS the longest part about it was working out a master template, then adjusting to fit. Besides, I like the idea of taking credit for everything on my site and not just the photography. Oh, and I Google a lot to get example/template coding to fix problems to acquire the desired effect. Currently working is Beale Air Show 06 in the Gallery section of my site as of last night.

bogleric · Jul 9, 2006

thanks for the info. I will check out proof buddy and jalbum.

NeoDude · Jul 20, 2006

DO visit http://validator.w3.org/ and make sure your code is valid.

DO make sure that you page is cross browser compatible. Not everyone uses IE (IE is kack tbh)

je-c: Your website looks good, but there are some alignment issues in Opera.