How to Create a Photo Gallery

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Like many people out there, you may want to create a web site to show off your photos of friends, family, vacation, wedding, etc. Well, this small tutorial will show you how to create a photo gallery and upload it to the Internet.

IrfanView is an image editor that allows you to create a photo gallery for free.  There aren't a lot of fancy options but the program is pretty easy to use.

Creating Your Photo Gallery on a Static Website (WordPress Details are Below)

  1. Download IrfanView for free here.
  2. Prepare your photos for the web. (Scan, upload to PC from digital camera, etc.)
  3. Save the photos you want to include in the gallery in a folder on your hard drive.  You may want to create a separate folder for this.
  4. Open IrfanView.
  5. Press T on the keyboard to launch the thumbnail window.
  6. In the thumbnail screen, go to Options > Set Thumbnail Options.
  7. Under Thumbnail quality, select the Use Resample box.
  8. Under Thumbnail size, choose the desired size for the thumbnail images that IrfanView will generate. 80x80 or 100x100 is a good size to use.
  9. Click OK to exit the Thumbnail options.
  10. In the left pane of the Thumbnails window, navigate to the folder where you placed your photos and wait for IrfanView to generate the thumbnails. It only takes a few seconds.
  11. Arrange the size of the thumbnail window to reflect how you want your Web page thumbnails arranged.
  12. Go to Options > Select all.
  13. Go to File > Save selected thumbs as HTML file. A browse window will appear. Navigate to the destination folder you selected in Step 3 and click OK.

After you've created your photo gallery, you still need to find a web hosting provider and upload (save) the HTML files and images so your gallery can be viewable on the web.

You can either choose a free hoster like Geocities.com (not recommended due to poor stability of free web site providers) or you can register your own dot com name and show off your cool photo gallery to your friends and family via YourOwnAddress.com.

Click here to learn how to register your own dot com name.

Creating a Photo Gallery on a WordPress Website

Thanks to WordPress, creating photo galleries is so much easier if you use this platform. There are a handful of plugins that you can use. For example, the NexGEN Gallery is a popular one that is fully loaded with features.

You can upload batches of images and manage your galleries with ease. There's even a feature that allows you to add watermarks to your images! How cool is that? This is probably one of the most flexible plugins around and it won't cost you a dime!

Learn more about starting a website with WordPress here.

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