ReavesMD.com

I’ve added a few new photos of Alexander to the album, including picture of him in his Halloween costume.

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Having started my residency a month ago, I haven’t had much time to blog lately. I have, however, recently posted photos from our vacation on Prince Edward Island last month.

One of my goals in re-designing this site was to add a photo gallery. Since I’m a Mac user, iPhoto was an obvious choice to store and organize my photos. However, when it comes to web integration, iPhoto is geared toward iWeb and .Mac, solutions that are easy to use but lacking in flexibility. iPhoto is capable of HTML export, but the resulting HTML files are ugly.

My initial approach was to use iPhoto’s HTML export and apply an XSLT stylesheet to insert a custom header and footer, thereby integrating the exported HTML into the general appearance of my site. I would write a Python script to apply the stylesheet to all of the HTML files in the photo album and use FTP to publish the files to my site.

I was able to create a stylesheet to convert the index page but ran into trouble with the pages for the individual pictures because iPhoto’s exported HTML is not XHTML. I began searching for alternatives.

My ideal iPhoto HTML export tool would

• Integrate seamlessly with iPhoto
• Provide easily customizable templates with clean HTML and CSS
• Work without a database or script on the server
• Be opensource

I considered Gallery, which integrates with iPhoto, allows customization, and is released under the GPL. I ultimately rejected it mainly because it requires a database backend. Gallery seems like a good choice for those who are technically savvy, don’t want to use a third-party hosting service, and have lots of photos to publish. It seemed like overkill for my humble site.

I also considered Better HTML Export, which is probably closer to what I was looking for. It integrates with iPhoto and allows customization of the HTML output, and it does’t require a database backend. Better HTML Export has received lots of positive reviews. However, it is not open source and costs $20.

I finally settled on Galerie, an imperfect but serviceable solution. Galerie integrates with iPhoto (and with other similar programs); it exports whichever photo album is selected in iPhoto.

Galerie offers a wide array of templates that are visually appealing. However, the underlying HTML in the templates that I examined left something to be desired, relying on a confusing combination of images, inline styles, and external stylesheets. I did not come across any templates that were valid XHTML with the styling relegated to an external stylesheet. The good news is that Galerie doesn’t stand in the way of the user creating cleaner code.

Galerie offers an intuitive user interface with all of the expected controls, including

• Main page title
• Layout and captioning of thumbnails on the index page
• Maximum size and captioning of images, including EXIF and IPTC
• Imprinting text and watermarking on pictures.

Once you’ve tweaked the settings, just click Generate Gallery and upload the results. Interestingly, if you attempt to remove the link back to the Galerie website from the template, you get an error message as the gallery is generated. This can easily be circumvented by commenting out the link or otherwise making the link invisible. (As you can see from my site, I left the link in but placed it at the bottom of the page.) This minor “nag” is the sort of thing one would avoid with an opensource solution.

Overall, I’m pleased with Galerie and would recommend it to anyone who has a modest number of photos to publish and prefers not to use a third-party photo hosting service. Galerie is not opensource but does offer integration with iPhoto, customizable templates, an intuitive user interface, and all of the features one would expect from a basic web photo publishing tool.