Gallery 2
I have been using the free photo hosting application Gallery 2 to use alongside my WordPress. I spent some time using a different free program called Coppermine because I wasn’t happy with Gallery 2 a year ago. Then, I wasn’t very happy with Coppermine so I switched back and they have made some nice leaps forward in their integration with Wordpress and in the design of one of the themes.
How can you use Gallery 2? First things first, you need to have an account with a server, basically space on the web to host your photos and website data. If you use Fantastico, you can easily add it where ever you like on your server. It is quite simple to go that way, otherwise you will need to download, and then re upload the files and set it up using the Gallery 2 online help guide.
I spent nearly 10 hours setting up the Taiwan Photo Gallery. It took so ling because I went through each photo renamed it (for more useful indexing by the image programs out there ie Google images). I also had to figure out how to set things up and use the WPG2 plugin. I use that, as well as the Ultimate Gallery2 Slideshow plugin. There are several thousand photos, and uploading them all just took a lot of time.
You will notice some areas with Google Advertisements on the site. Photos are becoming more and more popular, and if you have a few “hot” ones they can drive hundreds to thousands of visitors to your site daily. You may as well advertise it because it will help you to pay for the cost of personally hosting the photos.
Don’t forget to use the Sitemap plugin for Gallery. You want the search engines to see your site and start showing off your pictures to the world. Right?
I am a little put off by people stealing, but gallery 2 has two nice features, one being a watermark plugin that you can activate, and then upload a watermark jpg to be placed on all of the photos you add after you activate it. It doesn’t actually put it on the file though, so your pictures are safe and also are protected a bit from theft. The theme I use also has an option to disable the right click so it is very difficult to steal pictures from my site. And it is all done from options within Gallery.
The theme I use is called X_treme from Pedro Gilberto. There aren’t many themes available, and this is the most flexible (with seemingly a bazillion options) and by far the best in my opinion. You can easily download this theme, or any plugins from with the plugins tab within the site admin panel. Things are getting so easy I just love it.
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