Image Hosting

What Is A Photo Gallery?

Image software, also known as photo gallery software, are solutions that make it easy to display and share images on your website. Essentially they are an online photo album. Photo galleries are perfect for web sites or web pages where the primary content is images. With their ability for providing straightfoward management of your photo based web pages, image galleries provide the perfect solution for public or private sharing of your images with seamless integration into your sites.

While image galleries are often used by photographers to display their work in an attractive fashion, they can be used by anyone to embed organized images into their website.

Organize Your Image Gallery How You Want It

Just as every website isn’t the same, each web gallery has their own needs as far as how they want their website run. Here are just a few of the ways you can organize your image gallery.

• Album Organization – Create as many categories as you want for your images and add each image to as many categories as you like. For example, you may have a travel album. The best way to organize your pictures would perhaps be by the trip, year or location of your travels.
• Image Tags – Just as hashtags can be used to organize social media tweets for organization and later retrieval, your images can have tags added to them. This way you or your visitors can easily find relevant images that fit a specific tag.
• Define Photo Description – Just as image tags can add content and add additional information to each image or album, so can captions, image titles and image descriptions.

Image Hosting Service Software Features

Additional features found in image hosting software include:

• Easy Image Upload – Allow for user-friendly image uploads via an FTP client, a web form or a desktop application of your choice.
• Privacy Settings – Not all image galleries will be for the public to see. For example, a parent may start a web gallery with pictures of their children and they do not want just anyone to be able to view them. They may just be for family and friends. Setup custom permissions on individual albums or per image to allow only specified visitors with the correct credentials to view them.
• Extensible – Just as blogs and CMS solutions can be customized, image galleries can also be extended and customized through a series of plugins and themes.
• Seamless Integration – Just as a blog or CMS is designed for content management and a forum is designed for community building, an image gallery is designed for the organization of your images. While a blog, CMS or forum may advertise that images are allowed, they are not going to have the rich image functionality found with a web gallery. However, these solutions likely allow for seamless integration of your image gallery into them so you and your visitors can enjoy its functionality.
• Multiple Viewing Options – Allow your visitors to view your images as thumbnails, as a slideshow or full size within their browser window. Most image gallery software will even generate the thumbnail for your image automatically as a time saving feature.
• Videos – Web galleries are no longer just used to show off your pictures. You can also upload and display your videos as well!
• Social Sharing – Do you really want to get excellent exposure for your gallery? Most image hosting software offers built-in social sharing! This gives your image viewers an easy option to share your pictures on their social media accounts whether that is Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.
• Mobile Management – You don’t have to be a professional photographer or web developer to run your own online image gallery. In fact, most of us now have the vast majority of our images right on our cell phone. Manage your image gallery and upload images right from your mobile device containing all of your pictures!