simple flash and lightbox galleries you can embed in your site

Amateur and pro photographers, alike, have asked us for a painless way to put their pictures online in customized galleries. One of the easiest ways is to use Google’s free image organizer and editor, Picasa. It comes with a hard-to-find but easy export that can create professional-level flash or lightbox galleries that have no links back to Picasa. These can then be uploaded and used as they were created by Picasa. Or for pro photographers, these galleries would work great embedded in your site, with your logo, or even just a simple back link to your site, depending on your needs.

In Picasa, it’s easy to spot the big “web album” button and upload a gallery. However, this puts the images up on Google’s servers using a very basic, non-professional template. What isn’t obvious is that in the confusing menu location album>export HTML page is another export that uses a template you choose to create a gallery you can upload to your website with no Picasa branding.

The best part is that there are some really nice free templates available for download that are suitable for using on a pro or business website. Just be sure to check the licensing before using for commercial purposes. At the end of this article are instructions for how to install a template. Once it’s installed, it will be in the dropdown list you’ll see in the exportHTML page options.

The only downside is that Picasa creates the full web gallery offline and it’s up to you to get it on your site with the Picasa ftp option or an ftp program like SmartFTP.

Template Installation

To install, download the template (it will be a zip file), unzip, and place the whole template folder in your c:/program files/Picasa2/web/templates folder.