As everybody knows, digital photography is changing everything about how we store and display are images. Programs likes iPhoto and Photoshop Album allow users to catalog and archive thousands upon thousands of images on their hard drives. But, simply storing the photos is not enough. More often than not we end up with groups of images that we want to share either with a particular group (say, our family and friends) or the world at large.
And if you are someone like me, who works in the realm of design or graphics or multimedia or photography itself, then you likely have very prized and specific images (or other digital creations) that you wish to showcase.
To this end, I've been reading and thinking a lot about various methods for displaying images online. There are basically two choices: Slideshows or Galleries.
As far as I can tell there are several benefits to both.
An HTML gallery (similar to this amazing MT implementation by Dave Bowman) offers direct links to any image in the collection, the ability to add comments on a per image basis, search ability, bandwidth consumption on an image by image basis, user interactivity, among others. (And don't forget Flickr in all of this if you really are interested in sharing your photos with the world)
A slideshow application (perhaps powered by the super slick SlideShowPro Flash component by Todd Dominey) offers: music accompaniment or audio narration, image transistions, a passive audience view experience, thumbnails perhaps, but rarely the ability to hot link directly to a particular image.
What does all this add up to? Well, both approaches have pros and cons obviously. Take a look at some of these samples and let me know your thoughts.
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