14 DAY TRIAL // If you've ever had to keep an Internet picture gallery going, you know how tedious it can be. Take images, resize them, compress them, use web authoring program to add it to a page, upload everything and repeat. Doing twenty or so images like this at one time gets boring and tedious. If you wanted to have several intermediate sizes and compression levels other than the thumbnail, and if you wanted do also add descriptions, time and other info it would quickly turn into a nightmare.
Not surprisingly, web image sharing services are becoming more and more popular. But what if you wanted, for whatever reason, to keep a personal image gallery, the kind you can personalize in any way you want?
In steps Web Photos Pro, a program designed to do one thing: help you get your images sorted and on the web, without all the legwork.
Organize your images Workspaces make it easy to keep all albums with the same theme in one place. This way you can have a 'parties', a 'nature' and a 'sightseeing' workspace. And each workspace can hold as many albums as you like, and if an album name and cover image are not enough, you can add a description and a date. To each individual image you can set a title and a description, but also "tags", which act like album level keywords, and a location. If you want you can even add 'GeoInfo', which is the Latitude and Longitude in decimal form and which will be linked to a map site so that when you click 'GeoInfo: Map' inside the gallery, a new page will open and a map of the location loaded. I was truly surprised when the program did not automatically load the 'Date Created' of each image and assign it to the date field, leaving me to do that manually. The information is there it would have been so easy to have it loaded automatically I just don't see why it wasn't done.
Prepare for the Web Getting all those ten thousand images ready for the web is as easy as opening up the preferences of the program, going to the image tab and ticking off the sizes you want... same for thumbnails. There is no need for an external program or extra editing.
Now, getting those ten thousand images in a organized, gallery like Web page is as easy as selecting the Skin you want, and what information to display for the gallery, album and image. The program is build smart, so that if you choose to display location, but an image has no location information, the field and label for location will not appear for that image. This helps you avoid the sloppy look that missing information has a tendency to cause, without having to manually fiddle with each image's HTML or be forced to fill all the information fields for all the images.
To make things even simpler, the program also automatically processes the tags and creates the appropriate links so that clicking on any tag will show you all the images with that same tag. At the bottom of the album, Web Photos Pro will generate a list of tags, in alphabetical order, each tag being size coded for number of images linked to it.
If you entered the GeoInfo, you can search for images taken in close proximity. You can specify the search radius, in Kilometers, miles or nautical miles, which is a very nice touch. The search engine that is automatically integrated knows how to make use of Boolean modifiers and can search in any of the information tags which makes finding that one image a snap.
Web savvy If you don't like the default looks of the galleries you can make your own. It does require knowledge of HTML and CSS, but since you were maintaining a web image gallery before this program, you probably already know how to do that.
If you wish, you can even use Web Photos Pro to publish RSS and PhotoRSS feeds.
Uploading is easy and smart. Just enter your FTP information and the program automatically knows what needs to be uploaded from the gallery, so you don't have to either keep track of changed files yourself, or upload everything each time.
The Good A very fast and easy way to sort out all those images and get them on the web in a nice organized, search ready gallery.
The Bad Not exactly the most intuitive program you will ever use, and could use a little more automation, like the ability to import the date the images were created and the comments to certain fields. Also, for many, more templates would be a big plus.
The Truth Web Photos Pro is a one stop tool for maintaining an image gallery without doing any of the legwork. It does take a bit to get used to, but then again it takes no time compared to how many minutes you would be wasting if doing everything by hand.
Here are a few screenshots so you can see for yourself, click to enlarge:
