14 DAY TRIAL // Nowadays we like to share with our friends the beautiful, funny or otherwise unique moments captured with the digital camera. The thing is we all want to do it with style and not just any photo album creation software offers that.
There are those feature-packed programs that seem to be designed for creating a simple photo gallery, but will make you get carried away with all their editing functions and dozens of effects that can be applied to the images.
On the other hand, there are applications that enable you to create a picture album in a snap, but they end up looking unfinished, rough and overall with a big minus as far as style is concerned.
In rare cases you may get lucky and just stumble across the right one or you'll have a friend tell you about that program you're looking for. Well, now you can be that friend. Why? Because when it comes to simply putting together a picture gallery that looks great and then share it online, Web Photo Album might just be what you've been looking for.
This freeware utility not only gives the impression of being professional with a neat interface, but the product it delivers is also of the highest quality. The speed with which Web Photo Album allows you to make image galleries and share them on the web is one of its greatest advantages.
With Web Photo Album all becomes clear and from the first time you run the program it becomes obvious that the targeted user is just about anyone. The main interface's buttons are well placed and the text labels help the user identify the functions easily.
Web Photo Album offers a myriad of design templates based on which you can create your image gallery according to season, holiday, mood and anything you may think of. I fact, choosing the right template for you will take the most time with this application because once you decide on a specific one, the rest is a breeze.
First of all you give a name to your photo album, then input a link to your homepage and choose the thumbnail and slide size. You can adjust the latter after the photos are selected and after you decide which photo looks best viewed large, medium or small. Web Photo Album will also enable you to show the photo EXIF information in the gallery, rotate images using the EXIF info and even include the originals full-size images, but this could take some extra space.
This application is so bent on allowing you to personalize the web gallery that it allows you to add a personal header and footer for all pages of the album. You can write whatever you want to be displayed on each page of the image collection. A great thing with Web Photo Album is that you can preview the changes in real-time and this allows you to make corrections the moment you notice something that doesn't suite your needs and requirements.
In terms of image editing, Web Photo Album will provide only a few tools. It allows you to rotate the slides, fix the red eye problem, perform color correction and remove digital noise. All these have default parameters that cannot be customized by the user.
Whenever you want to publish your gallery, Web Photo Album will allow you to select the publish type between using a free photo hosting service and exporting the album contents to a local folder if you want to publish it on your own website. If you choose the last mentioned option, then all the files needed for web publishing will be transferred to the location you select and all that remains to be done is simply upload the content on your web page.
All the good looks and speed of the application take their toll on the system though, as Web Photo Album takes up quite a few memory and CPU resources. However, this is not at all an alarming consumption that can bring the PC to a sudden halt or cause glitches when operating with other running applications.
The Good
The interface of Web Photo Album is simply looking great and is very functional and at the same time easy to use.
With Web Photo Album you can create picture galleries and share them literally in minutes.
The speed of building albums doesn't make any compromises when it comes to quality, as the variety of great built-in templates is more than satisfactory for everyone and every occasion.
The albums created with Web Photo Album can be personalized with custom headers and footers for each page.
The Bad
A small drawback of Web Photo Album is the fact that it uses a rather large quantity of system resources due to the quality settings (that in fact compensates for this shortcoming).
The editing functions of Web Photo Album are limited and not configurable. It would have been nice to have just a few more tools like image resizing, a few effects and customizable correction settings.
The Truth
Web Photo Album does very well what it is designed to do and if you're looking for a software to create image galleries for sharing online, you may have just found the right one.
Even though the editing functions are scarce, I think this job would be done much better by a dedicated application anyway. Nonetheless, Web Photo Album is battling with the other similar software that come with such functionality and it does it quite well.
Given the fact that Web Photo Album is free of charge, you shouldn't think twice about taking it for a spin. You won't be disappointed; moreover, maybe you'll be surprised of what it can do and how well it does it.
