I’m often asked if there is an easy way to create a nice photo album for the church website. 
The answer is “YES.”

Most church websites are seriously lacking in photos. Yet in my experience, they are the most appreciated and viewed feature on the church website. Members love them. They help tell your story. They serve as a visual record of past events. They remind people of what’s great about your congregation. And they give people a reason to come back to your site –to see themselves.

My best advice to you is this: Build your photo pages with the future in mind.

When I first started out, I posted the pics as regular ol’ jpegs on simple html pages. I didn’t use thumbnails. Instead, I just cropped & dropped photos down to about 35k each, 400 x 300 pixels each, – so I could fit 5 or 6 per page without an overly long download time per page for the average visitor. That worked for about the first year or two.  But over time, the collection grew and became unwieldy.  And with some events, I wanted to post larger photos and more of them.

Within a year the collection had grown to the point where I needed a photo album utility program to manage my photos, generate thumbnails, and display them in some automatically created templates that looked nice. I also wanted something that looked a little more ‘professional.’

Not wanting to buy software, I experimented with the free stuff and was not disappointed. I downloaded some trial copies, and found that JALBUM was head & shoulders above the rest. www.jalbum.net 

JAlbum has a lots of display options, easy to use templates, advanced features for the geek, and automated batch processing of multiple photos. You just drop your pics into folders and let it generate the pages per your settings, then you upload the output to your site. JAlbum can even do that for you. It updates already uploaded album content each time you add more photos.

I won’t kid you, you do have to learn it, but it’s pretty easy if you already understand how to upload pages. I never read the manual. Screwed it up once or twice, then started to cruise. One of the things I like about JAlbum is that they are up to version 7 as of the date of this post. That shows a long-term commitment to improving and supporting their product. Very cool for a free program.  Some other ‘free’ album program out there are version 1 and buggy.

One downside to ANY photo album software or service is that “the next person” who comes after you may not be comfortable with your software, or like your approach to organizing the photos. And over 5 or 6 years you could AMASS quite a lot of photos. Not much you can do about that, except to remember to SAVE THE ORIGINALS so that whoever comes after you has original content to work with. Yet this is another reason I like JAlbum… the next person who comes after you will be able to get it for free and -if past is an indicator of future –will likely be working with an updated version.  That’s important because they’ll be able to MODIFY what you did, instead of having to start over from scratch with some other software.

Churches aren’t very good about maintaining ‘historical records’ such as photos, which is a shame. So think of your website as a repository for such archives, AND provide the church office with a CD of all your photo originals from time to time. Do them a favor and PRINT FAVORITE PHOTOS on high quality photo printers your BEST photos. In my experience, some burned CD-Rs can “go bad” after about 6 years. Discomforting I know, but word to the wise.

ALTERNATIVES:

Numerous photo websites offer free storage for your photos. Kodak, Picassa, Photobucket -to name a few. Here are the downsides to some “web based” approaches:

1. You upload your content to THEIR site, not yours. Your photo pages would not have your church’s navigational links.
2. You may be limited in your layout options.
3. You may have limited on storage space which doesn’t seem too little now, but may in a year or two.
4. If you choose an off-the-beaten-track photo gallery site, they could go out of business taking your photos with them.
5. Some of these sites will put ads with your photos.

If I had to pick one ‘web-based’ service, I’d go with Picasa. It’s from Google. They give you the free photo organizing software (with some photo editing tools), and give you 1 Gigabyte of free photo space. You can pay for more storage space. Your church’s webpage would simply have a LINK to your picasa website page. 

JAlbum is also free, uploads pics to YOUR site, has many more display options, and keeps all your photos under your own navigational menus.  www.jalbum.net

<>< Neil