Photo Galleries In Your Paysites?
 

What program are you guys using to build photo-galleries within
your paysites?

Costum made :thumbsup

I've been playing with Photoshop, Arles and ThumbsPlus and they all suck big time for building nice looking galleries.
Looking for something nice :Graucho

i design a template and then have arles build the galleries with the template. works fine for me.

?

Design a template? And import that into Arles?
You can build the template with something like Dreamweaver?

i guess so.

i do my templates by hand with notepad.

i do the design of the page (basically the header and footer) and then i put a tag where i want the actual thumbs table to go.

check the help files for arles. they'll give you all the info you need.

It doesnt have to look nice,

But make sure you give it some extra's like:

Click count per picture
Download link on each picture ( if they like them they can download it directly )
Slideshow

Some funny shit like that, they like that

go with Arles Dean. There are scripts out there that will do everything, u just upload a zip file of the images and it will make thumbs, hahahahahaha the images, build the pages etc but from what i've seen the quality of the thumbs suck.

http://www.digitaldutch.com/arles

more work involved(not that much) than the PHP based gallery scripts but Arles will produce a better end product.

Same here pretty much - make a template with Photoshop and Dreamweaver, generate very simple tables with Arles and copy-paste the tables with images into the template

hand made

Same here.. :thumbsup

Me too.

I would advice Arles too, once you got the advanced template feature figured out you can easily do 100k pics in notime with multi folder processing.

What I'd like to do - and I can't figure out how to do it in Arles - is to have my thumbs square. When you mix vertical and horizontal thumbs on a page - it doesn't look nice - doesn't have a pleasing layout. But if the thumbs are all square - it looks much nicer on the page. Not sure why I'm overly concerned about this though - guess I'm just a perfectionist and I want the galleries to look nice???

Is there a way to do this in Arles?

Here's a sample of what I'm talking about -

http://www.deancapture.com/images/thumb_sample.gif

If you want to make square thumbs, check out Express Thumbnail Creator at http://www.express-soft.com/etc/ or Gena Web Gallery Creator at http://www.kozasoft.com/ - I use both of those for building free sites :thumbsup

Hi Dean,

another way to do this is to use a whole CMS system for your members areas, like the CMS included in NATS. You can of course also get it seperately.

And the good thing is, not only can it create great photo galleries, it also has video management and in connection with NATS all kinds of more advanced features.

I always used to make them all vertical, disadvantage is that with horizontal images only part of the image is shown in the thumb, but it looks very nice and I assure you you won't get any complaints from members.

as far as i know, there's no way to do it with arles. but you can open the pages in a text editor afterwards and do a simple search and replace.

Thanks Mandy - I'll check into those :thumbsup

STG Thunbs is my weapon of choice to make nice galleries :thumbsup

It comes in two versions

Free: functional but limited

Paid: All features and very easy to work with

Get a programer to do a custom setup tailored to your members area. Works so much better.

Custom made.

Hire someone to make it according to your taste. :)

thumbs all the same size look so much better. if you don't worry about the little details your site will look shitty.

decide on a the width height ratio you want for your thumbs, in Arles you can hand crop the landscape or portrait ones to pick the best part of the image and crop.

None of these automated scripts can do that, a computer doesnt have the ability to look at an image and decide what to crop.

take a look at the nicest TGP galleries - all hand cropped thumbs, one consistent thumb size.

i have to re-download Arles, lost it when i had to wipe out my drive.

I dont have paysites.. but I use Arles for just about everything gallery-wise.

Great program. :thumbsup