The Web Hosting Blog of Host Color

In a recent post we reviewed the latest version of Zen photo, a simple and elegant application for managing an online photo gallery. Now we’ll take a look at two other tools that you can use with Host Color’s services to easily create and maintain an image gallery. These are SimpleViewer, an online flash gallery, and Gallery 2, a web based photo album organizer.

SimpleViewer is very powerful and simple to use application that allows site owners to create and customize online photo blogs and image websites. A gallery created with SimpleViewer is distinguished with its nice and easy to navigate interface both from the admin site and for the visitors. Visitors can view photos as a slide show and navigate with mouse clicks or the mouse wheel, or using the arrow keys from the keyboard.

Easy navigation, intuitive menus, intelligent image pre-loading along with the option to add description to images, changing fonts, colors and size make from SimpleViewer a good solution for small and personal photo websites. It especially suitable for integration in WordPress blogs.

SimpleViewer is really easy to install. The svManager, a PHP application that comes with the software package guides the whole process of installation step-by-step and has a comprehensive interface for managing the gallery.

Gallery 2 is another stylish and useful application for building and maintaining an online photo gallery. It can power both small personal sites and large social sites with lots of users.

Gallery 2 allows you to build as many photo galleries as you wish and to pop in again as many albums as you like. The galleries and the separate albums could be categorized. The Gallery two is translated to over 30 languages.

Visitors can register and to be granted different access levels. The site administrator can define which galleries and albums to be visible and to grant permissions to the different users’ groups to upload and modify images, albums or whole galleries. Visitors can easily access albums and galleries trough the category menu, and look and change images via the navigation bar that is displayed in every single page of the album.

The great advantage of Gallery 2 is the variety of customization options it provides. It is possible to build it in almost any website:

• CSS – you can change fonts, colors, distance between the images and the borders
• Themes – there is a wide choice of downloadable themes available for Gallery 2
• html-wrap – allows you to build in Gallery 2 in existing HTML website and make its content displays up, down or on a side of the image gallery.

If you want to create a personal website and share your pictures with friends – SimpleViewer is the right decision. For those addicted to shooting, who want to create a professional online photo gallery we recommend Gallery 2. Another very useful application for managing a online photo album is Zen photo for which latest release you may check in our recent blog post. SimpleViewer, Gallery 2 and Zen photo are available with our Photo Blog web hosting plan for as low as $2.99/mo. They are pre-installed in the PowerTools section of our web hosting control panel and can be deployed with a single click.