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ZenPhoto, An open Source Web Gallery that’s both simple & fully featured..



ZenPhoto, describes itself as a simple and useful web gallery for your website that’s fully featured. Their philosophy is “Simple is better”.  I couldn’t agree more with this, having used many different web gallery’s over the years I can finally say that Ive found a web gallery that does exactly what it says it does.

Although ZenPhoto is simple its still fully featured. With support for Cruft Free URLs, Multi Admin Rights,  Tags, Search, Themes and Plug-ins, while still remaining very friendly and easy to use. A full list of of features can be found on ZenPhoto

To my surprise ZenPhoto doesn’t just support the Standard Image file formats, it also support a range of video formats! Yes you can add video files to your gallery With support for .FLV, .MP4, .MOV and .3GP not only that it will also support  MP3 format too!

One of the features that I really like is the ability to navigate your gallery and edit the Title’s and Description’s directly from the page. I find doing this allot easier as I don’t have to look at rows and rows of tables.

Installing ZenPhoto is a breeze.

1. Download ZenPhoto
2. Upload Zenphoto to Your Website
3. Configure your Database
   

You can download the Latest Version of ZenPhoto from their website http://www.zenphoto.org at the time of writing this their latest version is 1.2.  Once you have Downloaded it, You need to re-upload it to your website, you can do this with FTP software. If your using FireFox you could try out FireFTP, a free extension for FireFox.

After Uploading ZenPhoto point your web browser to:

www.yoursite.org/zenphoto/zp-core/setup.php

File out the Setup form with your database and site information, if you haven’t already setup a database for this you can do so via your web host cpanel or phpmyadmin or of course what ever else your host supports.

You can now login and configure your web gallery, under the Options Tab you will find the Gallery Configuration. Here you can setup the Title & Description and URL of your Gallery, Change RSS settings, Set your Dates and many other options. Have a look through them they really aren’t that hard to understand. One option I recommend enabling is Mod-Rewrite option, This will enable the Cruft Free URLs. Gives you URLs that are both pretty and search engine friendly.

The themes tab will allow you to choose a theme for your new gallery, there is a few there by default but if you want more check out some of the themes on ZenPhoto.

Installing a theme is easy, just download the theme you want and upload to the themes directory on your site. Then go back to the Themes tab on your admin panel and choose your theme. Its that easy. Am sure there are other themes out there on the web.

You can now go ahead and upload your Images either with the Upload tab or FTP them to your Albums folder.

You can check out my ZenPhoto Gallery <<< And leave some comments and let me know what you think.

Have fun with your new web gallery.