Gallery change

It’s amazing what can prompt you to update your website, and what a huge chain reaction that can be. This all started about a month ago when I returned from a trip to California. I had taken a few images with my phone and wanted to put them online for others to see. Of course, I hadn’t made an update to my website in a long time, and I decided to completely redo my gallery using BananAlbum, which is a very nice flash-based photo album.

However, once I did that, I started looking into ways of overhauling the entire website. At a friend’s suggestion, I incorporate WordPress as a website management tool. Well, since then I’ve been rethinking my gallery options, and have decided I’d like to switch from the flash-based gallery to a WordPress-based gallery, and there are several reasons why this is a good idea!

JAlbum, which is the program that creates the BananAlbums, is a wonderful tool, but it requires me to be at my home computer to use it, which limits my ability to make image posts from afar. With the right gallery plugin, WordPress can generate the galleries for me. I can also have text within the gallery, which will enable me to add a little more content and context for each picture set.

The best reasons for the switch, however, are that the galleries will be searchable, can be indexed by search engines, and viewing statistics can be tracked. None of this is possible with the flash gallery. The flash album was a very nice implementation of the gallery, it worked very smoothly, the images were resized automatically, and the scrolling image selector was an instinctive GUI. Those are some nice features. But, ultimately, having an embedded seamless gallery makes more sense than the stand-alone flash viewer.