Gallery Wizard by Bjoern Ischo

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Gallery Wizard makes the work involved in making a photo gallery web page a breeze! Pick the pics, adjust the settings and with one click, your ready to upload your pages to your online photo album!! :)

1.2 Megs HERE!


Gallery Wizard by Bjoern Ischo

With the prices of digital cameras and scanners going way down, more and more people are getting into the online photo album scene. Just get a bit of web space, take your pictures, make a page and upload it. It really not too hard to do, UNTIL it comes to making the web pages. Gallery Wizard makes the creation of your album pages really easy to do. It has a great tabbed interface and a nice bunch of options to give you a bit of flexibility in your photo page design. It's nice to be able to present your photo collections online so that your memories can be shared with family and friends just by giving them a web site address. Here's the skinny........................

Platform........

Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, NT

Web Site..........

This program is featured on the authors site called "The B-Zone". The site is easy on the eyes designed with earth tones and standard fonts, and contains quite a number of other freeware programs that have been developed by the author. Definitely worth more that a quick glance.

Downloading........

It was an instant connection and download. It was that simple!

Installation..........

The download is a .zip file. Open it up into a temp directory (mine is C:\temp), click on the setup.exe file, follow the usual "Install Shield" prompts with your personal options and you're on your way!

Help Files..........

There's not too much to write home about in this category. The help file is in html (web page) format and will open your default web browser for viewing. Since this program is template based, there are many definitions for HTML code which is what the templates are written in.

Interface.............

Gallery Wizard uses a windowed interface with four tabs, each with it's own options for changing the locations and formats of the pages and pictures made. Here's a pic of the basic opening interface:

The window itself can not be opened to full page status as noted by the shaded out "expand" button. You options are made via radio buttons, check boxes, and data bars. Each function is explained and using the program is as easy as starting at the first tab and progressing to the last. It doesn't get much easier!

Features ...........

Gallery Wizard allows you to make photo web pages in a matter of a couple of minutes! Just pick your pictures on the first tabbed page as seen above. You can pick complete directories of photos, random selections, or both. Any combination is possible. When making your choice, the window that comes up even enables you to view the assorted photos one by one, getting rid of the guess work. Here's a pic of that:
The next tabbed window allows you to adjust the design of the thumbnails, which are smaller sample pictures displayed on the main page of your photo page. Clicking on a thumbnail by a visitor will bring up the full sized picture in their browser. The choice of effects are good and they can really make a difference in the way these smaller pictures are shown. You get to set the width, height and quality of the thumbnails, as well as the filename prefix and suffix. Here's a pic of the second tabbed window:
With that being done, it's on to the third tab which is the "output options" area. This is where you chose the location of the files being developed, the HTML template you wish to use, the amount of table rows and columns, and any other necessary information. Here's a pic of that tab:
The final tabbed window is where the template is displayed and where you can make changes to the html code that comes with the template. Here is where you can check the box to make a separate page for each image that will show.
Does it Work.........
Like a charm!! Of course, I've been playing with this thing for a couple of weeks to see how it works and I'm impressed. I've taken the liberty of picking some of my favorite "Pipster's Update" photos from my collection and using them to create my own test page to show you exactly what they can look like. Click HERE to view them (these are poor quality photos and do not reflect on the program itself). Notice that the initial home page comes complete with highlighters at the bottom for "next", "previous" and "home". The other templates have icons performing the same functions. That's a nice touch!
Problems.........
There are none that I've come across. If you know html code, it's a bonus as you can adapt the templates to the design that you've developed on your web pages. The program comes with a few template selections and since I don't know html code, I'd like to see a few more templates available, perhaps from the home site. The help page that comes with the program is more of an "html guide" than a program help file, but Gallery Wizard is so easy to use, it doesn't really need much more of an explanation.
Closing.........
It's easy, fast and completely free. If you are into making your own web based photo albums, I would highly recommend this nice little program to give you the speed needed to make this hobby much more enjoyable.
Enjoy

Buzzy J

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