How to make a Web Gallery

What follows is the guidelines for how to make a simple gallery of pictures and then details of how to publish to the web. It may seem rather lengthy, but I have gone into a fair bit of detail.

Any term in bold is explained in the glossary at the bottom. Just click on the word to be taken there.

What you need!

  • Some pictures in Jpeg format. Each will need an individual filename, and to ensure they are in the order you want them I would suggest calling something like craigpicture01.jpg, craigpicture02.jpg etc. All file names should ideally be all lower case.
  • Some Web space, and the FTP details for access. Your host should have supplied these. The amount you will need will depend on the number and size of pictures. If you reckon on one and a half times the size of your pictures, that will be plenty.
  • Arles web page gallery maker. This is shareware and available from here. Install once downloaded.
  • Filezilla FTP client (available here). You can upload direct from Arles, but it is erratic and this way will give you a better feel for FTP going forward.

That’s it for now. There are some other things you will need to enhance your gallery later, but what we will do now is the most basic setup and install.

1. First step is to sort your pictures. Create a new folder on your hard drive and put them in there. Nothing else should be in this folder.

2. Start up Arles. Click 'I agree' on the shareware bit to get into the main program.

3. To the right of the empty box marked ‘Source folder’ is a button, click and then point to the folder in which your images are contained.

4. Now uncheck the box marked Target and Source are the same. To make it easier to upload the files, I would suggest appending to the end of the existing file location in the target box the following ‘/gallery’ (Lower case). This will mean that all of your files for the webpage are neatly tucked away in their own folder.

5. Now click the button at the top marked ‘All’. You will get a pop marked ‘Confirm overwrite’ Check the ‘Don’t ask again’ and then click Yes. The program will then create your gallery.

6. Click the arrow to the right of the button marked ‘Show’, select Internet Explorer, and that should start a browser, with your gallery in it, showing nice thumbnails of all of your pictures, which you can click on to see the full size image. This is created on your local drive in the same folder as your original pics. The next step is to publish onto the Internet, but before we do that, it will be worthwhile talking a bit about web pages and the address for them.

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