The number of web based photo album software packages steadily increase; some are less successful attempts. Web based photo album software can be divided into a number of categories: Quick ‘n’ Dirty, Small, Large, Custom, and Photo management. You could probably find another 100 categories, but this is a fairly decent base set. It’s also quite popular to embed/incorporate a photo album as part of a blog or a website running some other software (like Joomla, WordPress, S9Y, and so on).
What is a good package is an impossible discussion :-); “everyone is entitled to their opinion” definitely applies. I’ve been using the PHP-based dAlbum for a number of years. The main reason was “simplicity”. I didn’t need anything fancy, nor did I care much about themes or extending the functionality of my photo album. dAlbum also doesn’t require a database connection. For another website, I’ve been using Gallery. The biggest problem with Gallery (IMHO), is that it’s quite big/bloated. I can definitely do a lot of things, but it’s a bit like Microsoft Office, very few users need all of its functionality 🙂
Recently, a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of ZenPhoto, which is “yet another PHP-based web photo album” package 🙂 Its functionality is fairly simple and straightforward. There are themes, although not that many, and there are some extensions; WordPress, Google Maps, etc. What’s more important (to me) is that it does the job, and I don’t feel too limited by its features (or lack thereof). ZenPhoto’s requirements are quite small, although one could argue that the need for a MySQL database makes it unnecessarily complex: PHP 4.10+ with GD support and MySQL 3.23+. It works nicely with MySQL 5.x and PHP 5.x.
Are you stuck with an old/bloated/static/sad piece of web based photo album software? Perhaps you should check out ZenPhoto too: ZenPhoto.org