A long time ago, artists and photographers had to rely on regular galleries to display their work. And while this method has its advantages, it also marks several disadvantages. With the Internet Revolution, everyone, who could afford a cheap web hosting account, could create a personal website. However, in the beginning, creating websites was not easy, since not everybody had the skill to create their own site. But today, online image galleries can be created in under 5 minutes!
Online image galleries
The concept of the image galleries is to present the visitor with the images, graphics and pictures created by the respective owner of the gallery. They are divided into several image albums, just like in a blog the posts are divided into categories. This way the visitor can view just the images he is interested in. Each image album is presented to the user with a thumbnail, indicating the type of pictures, which are in it, and once inside the album, the images will once again be presented by thumbnails in order to allow for faster loading times and less traffic consumption.
Online image galleries were in the beginning very simple. They appeared as soon as images could be included into web pages, but consisted of only several images and contact information. In the latest years they have undergone a real evolution with the introduction of the image gallery scripts. They allow a new image gallery to be taken online in just a few minutes, with specific knowledge required.
Image gallery hosting
Today, we live in a time where everyone wants to share what they are up to at the moment, and there is no better way to do that than through a picture. There are places where you can host just a picture or two. They have traffic limits, which will restrict a lot of people from viewing your image or photo. Some will even require registration. This is why, the best choice for someone who wants to have a personal online image gallery with several albums and lots of images, is a special web hosting account, dedicated just to that.
At NTC Hosting, we offer a dedicated web hosting plan - 4images Hosting, which is optimized for the 4images script gallery. This optimization means that this web hosting plan comes with this script installed right from the start and that as soon as your domain name comes online, it will instantly show your brand new image gallery.
Image gallery scripts
An image gallery script is just like a blog script - it allows for almost instant creation of image gallery websites. And just like with blog scripts, there are several scripts, which you can use to create your own image gallery.
4images gallery
4images is a very good online gallery, which makes album creation a breeze. One of the biggest advantages of the 4images gallery is its strong community, which is dedicated to improving its functionality and fixing any issues that may arise with this script.
It also sports an easy to use web interface - all needed operations can be done via a simple, user-friendly menu. It also offers a variety of advanced features, such as a comment system, a password protected administration area with browser-based upload support, HTML templates for page layout and design, rating of images, spam protection, hotlinking protection, e-cards, etc.
Coppermine
Coppermine is a very popular image gallery, which supports a wide variety of templates. It also has a complete user interface, which allows you to configure almost every feature of the gallery. Coppermine can handle several albums inside which, reviewing the different images is very easy. Coppermine also supports private galleries, which can be viewed by selected users only.
However, due to the variety of options Coppermine offers, it sometimes can be confusing for the novice user to choose exactly what he needs.
Gallery2
Gallery2 is aimed at being simple and easy to use. It has a very user-friendly interface and one can get used to it in a matter of minutes. One of its strong features is that it allows different users to upload photos and images apart from the site administrator, meaning that you can allow your friends and family to also upload photos, all in the same place. This eliminates the need for creating several albums for every user, since a single user can upload albums in the already existing image albums.
Plogger
Plogger was originally designed to be an image gallery script, which could work without a MySQL database. However, with the growth of the project, today this gallery script does require a MySQL database, while it still remains very simple to use and install.
Plogger also offers several ways of integration with websites and other scripts, such as WordPress, which makes it a perfect gallery for a blog or another personal website.
Installing a gallery script with NTC Hosting
At NTC Hosting, we know that setting up a script to work right is a hard task, especially when you don't want to deal with this. This is why we have prepared a 1-click script installer tool, which will do the job for you. All you need to do is point where you want the script installed, choose the actual script and relax. This feature comes at no additional price with all our web hosting plans, regular or script-based.