On my Home Page, my son Chris and I have been trying to come up with the best way to display our family pictures. No matter how user-friendly we made the display, users to our site always seemed to have problems. Most of the time, the pictures would just take forever to load, and then we would get nasty messages from our host provider. Don't get me wrong, what was developed looked fantastic, but it really doesn't matter if the pictures can't be easily viewed.
Those who know me know that I'm a big Disney fan. One of the daily emails I receive is from a Yahoo Group called the "Daily Dose of Disney". They sometimes give links to Disney blogs, and one day they linked to a site where the blogger displayed their Disney pictures using something called Exhibit Engine. I loved the way the pictures looked in each gallery, and I especially liked the tools it provided. It allowed for user customization of each gallery; it had the ability to search for pictures, and each gallery could be viewed as a slideshow. The only question were: was it free and can we install it?
Well it was free, but a few months went by while Chris and I thought about it. Last week, I finally started the process of getting Exhibit Engine onto our site. The current version of EE is 2.02, but there isn't a full install to that version. It meant installing EE 1.5 first, then upgrading. Initially, I tried to do the install locally, but it just wasn't working. I decided to go for it and install it on our web server and see what happened. First, I had to create a MySQL database, a database user, and a FTP account. Done. And after several unsuccessful tries (all due to my mistakes), EE installed itself perfectly. I immediately had a console for which I could perform a vast number of administration procedures -- and post pictures! I was very surprised when EE told me that my host provider had provided the software I needed to resize images. Cool!
The next step was to upgrade to EE 2.0. Again, after getting through one mistake on my part (I left off the last character of the database password), it was successful. Now I can create groups, which contain exhibitions, which contain the actual pictures. The whole thing is completely customizable, and the images load very quickly -- no more user complaints! I can add comments to each image, and users can comment as well. It provides a guestbook, a place for me to list News items...I could go on and on.
If your looking for a way to display photographs on your site, check out Exhibit Engine. To Pekka Saarinen, the creator of Exhibit Engine, thank you for your wonderful software.
