For photographers, travelers and other photo lovers who want to start a web presence, a professional photo gallery software is necessary because they will need the easy-to-use features for photo uploading, editing, sharing, and more, just in the same way that a powerful blog software serves blogs better, and an award-winning forum application is needed to build a highly active forum.
So far, we have reviewed and tested dozens of photo gallery software and worked out a list of the 5 best ones that come with useful features, extensive support and active development. Besides, all of them are suitable for sites with a large number of images and photos to deal with. Pay attention that as all of them are self-hosted applications, and a stable and fast image hosting service contribute much to the online success.
Gallery
Website: http://galleryproject.org/
Gallery is recognized as one the best solutions for online image management mainly because of its power admin, user management and image editing features. With years of development, the version 3 enables site owners to view photo, album and full size photo, add comment, subscribe to album, choose language, and so on.
For photo editing, Gallery comes with the features of uploading and deleting photo, uploading and adding watermark, changing album permissions, arranging rotating, tagging photo, and categorizing images into albums for easy update and arrangement. Also, users are able to create group, install plugins, change site design and configure everything else in the dashboard.
Piwigo
Website: http://piwigo.org/
Piwigo is developed with a large number of features for phone galleries with new ones adding gradually. Using the software, webmasters are allowed to upload images in many ways by using a web form, an FTP client or desktop applications. Once images are uploaded successfully, they can organize them with albums, add tags, set the view permission, and create slideshow for better showcasing.
Creating a site with Piwigo is more than easy because the user only needs to accomplish several steps which include finding a reliable Piwigo hosting provider, downloading the zipped file and then installing the software. The whole process takes minutes only, with no troubles happening in most cases. Besides, Piwigo is highly customizable as it comes with a large set of plugins and themes.
ZenPhoto
Website: http://www.zenphoto.org/
Started in 2005, ZenPhoto is a CMS with focus on websites whose main content is media files. Licensed under GPL v2, the software is free to download and install, but it also prepares paid support service for people who have trouble in managing it. The latest version is 1.4.6 released on May 26, 2014.
ZenPhoto supports multi-photo upload, so that users can upload images in bulk at the same time to eliminate troubles of distinguishing the uploaded and ready-to-upload files. Besides, the scheduled publishing makes it possible to keep the site active even when the site owner and editors are not online for several days. Moreover, ZenPhoto allows people to maintain a rich-featured blog on the site.
4images
Website: http://www.4homepages.de/
As a PHP and MySQL based image gallery management system, 4images is supported by most of the available web hosting packages in the market. It gains increasing popularity in these years as more and more people are fascinated by the rich functions in the management of category, image, comment and user.
4images gives users the ability of creating an unlimited number of categories and subcategories, browsing the statistics of clicks and likes of each category, and add descriptions. Also, the software supports all of the popular files types and is extendable for all file types, so that the compatibility is never a problem. The software also allows users to set the permissions for image downloading.
TinyWebGallery
Website: http://www.tinywebgallery.com/
TinyWebGallery is a free-to-use application that comes with a wide set of user-friendly features which help photographers make a success of spreading their photos and making them well-known. The application does not require a database to store files, and instead, it uses xml files. Some of the important features are as explained in below.
TinyWebGallery supports slideshow and includes 3 types of slideshow by default, so webmasters are able to deliver a better effect for image showcasing. In addition, they can add image or text watermark, sort images by date and name, cache images for optimized performance, insert advanced search options, and manage the rotation of images.