I am planning to start a website to present my drawings. I am hoping to get some traffic through "pictures of blah blah" and "blah blah drawings" searches. I want to have some kind of gallery that can be updated through a content management system - where I add pictures and make separate pages for them without the need to actually code stuff, while the pages remain spiderable. I know this is asking for much, but could anyone suggest any programs that have any of these features? Because, this time around, I need to make sure this new project of mine has strong foundations. To recap: I am looking for a preferably free cms system with advanced image capabilities.
I would make one HTML template and stamp out page after page after page. Use php in HTML and create a dynamic header, footer and ad blocks. If you use a gallery, for SE indexing purposes, make sure you can put about a 300 word description for them to chew on and use nice unique descriptive alt tags for the pics.
That's all good and well if you're only talking about 20-30 pages. After that, it becomes a huge pain to maintain. Are you using a windows or linux based web server? (I won't assume that it's linux just because most everyone here seems to think that's all there is.) If you're using windows, I can point you to some scripts or offer one that I've written for this exact purpose.
Please qualify that? For each page you open the template and change the img tag and the description. You upload the file and add a link to it in the index. If that's hard, you're in the wrong biz IMO. Any changes to the header, footer or ads are site wide. But what do I know. :/
I like Coppermine.. I did some .htaccess and coding tweaks for my parents site to make it spiderable.. before the tweak they have 0 pages indexed in their gallery.. they now have a lot -- http://www.google.com/search?q=site:rainbowseeker.us Eric
Then you just have too much time on your hands For anything more than 30 or so pages, the amount of effort to do as you've described is significantly greater and allows much more room for error (getting the navigation links configured properly, etc.) than using a cms application to maintain the images. Especially if one or more needs to be deleted. Maintaining the index becomes a huge job. Not to mention just keeping track of all of the pages that start building up.
I am using Linux! To noppid: That's what I am doing at the time (using SSI for headers and everything). But if there's an even easier way, I would like to go for it instead. Will check out the sites to see if I find anything suitable, thanks.
Gallery is a pretty decent application, and typo3 utilizes imagemagick for a lot of it's image handling. There's a neat utility in there for framing images. Gallery does the best job though - with creating thumbnail, medium, large, and high res views along with slideshows. The end user interface needs some work though IMO. Check out Gallery 2 and Typo3. Other CMS's don't do much in the way of handling images IMO, and Gallery isn't really a CMS, but you can use it for one. Another option is to use something like PhotoShop Elements to build static pages for you. I think Jasc has a solution in that regards as well.