10 Best Photo Gallery Scripts for Web Developers
Displaying galleries of images on a website is a common practice that many people struggle with simply because they have no means to deploy the images without loading a large gallery tool or script. We’ve created a list of our 10 favorite light-weight gallery scripts for deploying photo galleries in a website.
#1 Slide Show Pro – This one doesn’t really count as a “script” but it’s lightweight and extremely customizable. You’ll need a good copy of Adobe Flash and the ability to follow basic instructions to set this script up, but once you learn to harness it’s power you can customize the gallery to do just about anything you want! In addition to photos, you can load HD streaming video and the player can be linked to “SlideShow Director” which allows non-technical users to manage their galleries through hosted or stand-alone control panels.
#2 Fancy Zoom – If you’re Mac user and have visited any popular Apple product website you’ll recognize this pop-up image look. Fancy Zoom uses the Prototype JS library to control the effect and it allows you to embedd images, text, or even flash into the popup window.
#3 LiteBox – A simple, smaller very of Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox2 photogallery script. This simple script allows you to quickly create a zoomed version of image thumbnails in your website pages. It provides support for single photos as well as provides support for creating a navigable gallery of images.
#4 Shadowbox – Billed as a “online media viewer application” this script gives developers the ability to link to images, flash, video, text, websites, and other media content without having to make the visitor leave the page. It works in all modern browsers and has a fairly good support community.
#5 Cabel’s FacyZoom – Cabel’s version of FancyZoom is the original script. It uses AJAX to load the images to save initial page load weight. It has some great features and works in all modern browsers but developers should simply compare the two versions of FancyZoom and select which one is best for their project.
#6 Galleria – Based in jQuery, Galleria is a beautiful, smooth and elegant photo gallery script that offers full pre-load functionality and easy thumbnail based navigation for the photos. Can be integrated with Flickr accounts to keep the dynamic code from being broken by inexperienced end-users.
#7 (E)2 Photo Gallery – Developed with Javascript and PHP, allows users to upload images to a folder, define the folder in the script and it will pull the images from that folder dynamically. This isn’t exactly groundbreaking but it is a useful feature, and the clean javascript effects and pre-loader give the player a nice face.
#8 slideViewer – A simple jQuery based gallery script that uses javascript and css to display images formatted in a simple unordered list. It is designed to show images that are the same size, so the application is limited, however this script is easily useful for small highlights and slide galleries.
#9 SmoothGallery – A powerful javascript based gallery system that allows multiple collections of photos. The script features an easy to use navigation system and seems fairly well built and works in all the major browsers.
#10 Imago – This gallery script developed with AJAX and designed to allow you to pull photos from different sources make it very versatile. It has support for Flickr, SmugMug, SimplViewer, has a small footprint and is built with Mootools.
[...] 10 Best Photo Gallery Scripts for Web Developers [...]
Great list, thanks so much for putting it together. The only suggestion I’d give is that it would be nice to see up front which options are free and which are paid. Perhaps an icon by each review or a matrix comparing these? I ended up going with Galleria, though Slideshow pro was a close second. In the end galleria seemed like a more intuitive interface and was easier to set up. I loved the ability to add videos as well as pictures available in Slideshow pro. Great products!
10 best photo gallery scripts for web developers…
Building photo galleries for your web site can be painful. Luckly, there are some great scripts you can use. Some are free. Check this out: 10 best photo gallery scripts…
Thanks for putting this list together. It’s great to see that slideshow pro is still updating their software to stay competitive. Their pan and zoom feature is very impressive.
Shadowboxis my fave, due to its myriad file support.
I think 1-6 are great overall, but I doubt I would ever use 7-10. The idea behind #8 is great, but should spend more work on the UI to really win an audience over.
Thanks again.
very helpful site indeed!
How can i build gallery, I want text can appear just below the gallery when mouse touches the thumbnail.
please email me the solution.
thanks in advance.
Lopsang Sherpa, from Nepal