What is a good way to implement photo galleries on Wordpress?

Question

I want to publish about 1GB of photos on my Wordpress-powered website. I want viewers to load the photos quickly, but also tobe able to download high-resolution versions.

Here is what I have tried.

1) Using NextGen: This seems great, but when huge photos are uploaded, NextGen does not automatically shrink them, making galleries very slow.

2) Using Flickr: Unfortunately, many of my clients view the photos from China, and Flickr is slow there sometimes. Besides, free Flickr has an upload limit of 300MB/month.

3) Picasa: Same, Google applications are slow in China.

I am open to a budget of < $25/year, but would really appreciate free services.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I don't understand the problem with NextGen. For a "gallery page" it creates thumbernails which are small (in fact as you can set the size up as you want it). The same goes for opening images themselves - you can set up the resize option for the full size size of images.

Example - it means that if you upload a 5000x5000px image, you can tell NextGen to automatically create thumbernails that are 150x150px, and to shrink images to 1000x1000px.

I mean, if you have really huge photos and you do not resize them, it will take some time for the browser to load them up, there is no going around that..

Or maybe what you want is to have auto thumbnail and image resizing (150x150px thumbs, and 1000x1000px) for viewing in the browser, but to also keep the option of downloading the original full size image?

Perhaps plogger or zenphotopress might better suit your needs.

Answer 2

I have been using Zenphoto together with a plugin (my own) for that purpose. ZP is not the best written software, but it does the job, lets you keep your data and is free.

Answer 3

It won't integrate directly into WordPress but jAlbum is a free app which creates html based galleries which can then be uploaded into any host space.

It has many themes and many options for customisation.