A Web Gallery Journey Over the Years

Note: most inline screenshot images can be clicked on to open at full-resolution in a new tab or window, or to open the actual web gallery they are referring to. To see the above headline image larger, comparing my previous web gallery design with my new one, click here.

For those photographers that maybe don’t have an Instagram account (guilty), don’t have a hosted gallery with Flickr, Zenfolio, Adobe or others (guilty), and who actually have their own website and want to share image galleries (yep, that’s me as well), I thought some might be interested in my latest transition to some new web gallery creation software, as well as some history of what I’ve done over the years. As you’ll read, due to inevitable software updates I was forced away from using my previous web gallery export software, and while it took a some hunting online, downloading a few demo packages and experimenting, in the end finding a new gallery creation program was actually far less painful than I had expected.

For many years now, since June of 2010 actually, I have had a Google hosted image blog (http://www.mikemander.com) that started out partially as a blog for Beau Photo, and partially as one to show my work in a more modern and less tedious way than manually editing website HTML code with Dreamweaver, which I had done for many years prior. Back then, it was an experiment to see if blogging was at all useful for Beau Photo, and of course it indeed turned out to be. In fact, in September of 2011, I split the Beau Photo blog off on its own (its content can still be seen here: http://beauphoto.blogspot.com) and it continued on until August of 2017 when Beau Photo launched a brand new website with an integrated blog.

A few years prior to creating my own blog, back in 2007, I had revamped my own personal website and started using a free Adobe Lightroom gallery export module called ShadowBox from theturninggate.net. I had customized it to give it a more personal look and used it with Lightroom v.2 to begin with, and at the time was happy with what I got. Here is an early example gallery from that export module…

Click above image to open the web gallery in a new window or tab.

Of course Lightroom was continually updated and in 2010, inevitably ShadowBox stopped working, right around the time I started my blog. I ended up purchasing a new export module called TTG Highslide from the same website; it was no longer free. Although it was a huge amount of work to customize it to my liking, giving in a fairly unique personal style, there were real advantages too. There was more design flexibility and one thing I really liked was the ability to link to Google Maps to show where photos were taken. I got a very long run out of that web gallery plugin, all the way until very recently, although there had been a few hiccups along the way. Following is an example gallery from a 2018 trip to Germany, exported by TTG Highslide, and on the top-left of each “slide” you can click on the globe icon to see where the photo was taken, and below each large image is EXIF data and a button to download a larger version…

Click above image to open the web gallery in a new window or tab.

I kept the layout of my web galleries basically the same for 16 years, a good long run. When Adobe Lightroom v.6 came out in 2015, it would no longer run the TTG Highslide properly: when you went to edit a web gallery, the content would flash up briefly and then I was left with a white screen so I could not see what I was editing. To that end, I kept a copy of Lightroom 5 running on my computer strictly for creating my web galleries, but finally at some point in 2025, a computer upgrade plus an OS X update no longer allowed Lightroom 5 to run at all, so I was stuck using the newer Adobe Creative Cloud Lightroom Classic with the white screen issue when using TTG Highslide. I could still edit the settings to export a web gallery successfully, but I had to open the exported gallery in a browser to see my changes and test it out. Thankfully I was (and still am) running a Mac Mini with an M4 processor, so exports were very speedy, which made that less painful than it could have been.

Finally, just about a week ago with the latest update to Adobe Lightroom (v.15.5.1), the TTG Highslide export module stopped working completely. Exporting a gallery gave messed up formatting and visible XML code scattered all over every page, so finally it became totally unusable. I can’t really complain too much, since I did manage to eke out 16 years of use from that plugin! My biggest concern was whether or not I could find something that would allow for extensive customization and integration with my blog, was able to show EXIF camera data and had the ability to display a map of where a photo was taken, reading the GPS metadata embedded in the photos. Here is a screenshot of a recent gallery that exported with the code glitch…

Example screenshot of a glitched export with the latest Adobe Lightroom.

In the meantime, I downgraded Lightroom back to v15.4.1 which still allowed the “white screen” export to work and started hunting around for a replacement in earnest. Interestingly enough, a few weeks prior I had already started hunting for alternative web gallery software since I had a feeling I might need something in the near future! I thought I might try theturninggate’s new Backlight web gallery software, but it is quite expensive (over $200) and it did not seem to really offer the specific flexibility I wanted, although it had a lot of other features, ones I didn’t need. I no longer wanted to be at the mercy of Lightroom updates either, so I tried a number of different stand-alone web gallery export programs and emailed a few companies for details when they didn’t have free demo versions. Unfortunately none gave me the flexibility and features I was looking for either, and no company I contacted even bothered to reply back to my questions. With some more research and more specific Googling, I finally came across jAlbum (https://jalbum.net) the other day. After some promising tests with the free, feature limited version and seeing some sample galleries online that seemed to do most of what I wanted, I decided to give it a go and spend the $85 for the mid-tier Standard License product. I didn’t feel like wasting more time waiting for an email reply that might never have come, and since there was a 30-day money back guarantee, I thought I could safely try it out.

Well, I do think the money was well spent! jAlbum is insanely flexible software and what few settings I couldn’t tweak in the software, I was able to add my own custom CSS code to override defaults. I am using their “Tiger/Exhibition” theme with various CSS tweaks that only took me a few hours to mess around with and fine tune… and while I might continue tweaking things like fonts and such, I do think I’ve found my new web gallery software! Here is a screenshot of the gallery interface. Yes, a bit intimidating at first, but I wanted this sort of design flexibility so you can’t really get away from a complex interface…

 Click above image to open a larger view in a new window or tab.

For an example of my new gallery design, see this one from a 2022 trip to Germany a recently remade…

Click above image to open the web gallery in a new window or tab.

What is super cool is that I can have a map view at the top of the gallery showing pins where all the photos were taken, as you can see in the above screenshot, and you can zoom in and pan around this map view. Clicking on a pin will actually take you right to the corresponding photo in the lightbox view. Nice! When you are in the lightbox, you can double click on an image to zoom in to the full resolution I’ve uploaded, and you can then drag around the image to see all parts of it. A second double click zooms back out to fit. This is far more convenient than with my old web galleries, where you had to click on a button to open a larger image in a new window. In addition, the high-res image is no longer downloadable or right-clickable, to help prevent copyright infringement. Under the image is a button to show “Photo data” where a pop-up window opens with detailed EXIF data. The data being shown can also be extensively customized….

There is a “Map” button that opens a pop-up map window, showing exactly where the photo was taken. My previous web galleries were tied to Google Maps but this new software is using the open-source OpenStreetMap database which is often even more detailed than Google. Here is a sample map view…

For comprehensive tutorial about how I geotag my photos, this blog posting might be of interest: https://www.beauphoto.com/geotagging-images-in-adobe-lightroom/

There is also a customizable “Info” popup window where I included the ability to email about a gallery, put in copyright info, added credit and a link back to jAlbum (since I switched off a jAlbum link appearing on every single page to make things cleaner) and included some info about geotagging in my galleries…

For a comparison between my old and new galleries, here is the one from Gengenbach, Germany exported previously with TTG Highslide, before the glitchy Lightroom update. The jAlbum galleries also function far better on phones and tablets, something that my old galleries did rather poorly to be honest. Now you can swipe to change images and single or double-tap to zoom in and zoom out again. The images (and the maps) also smoothly pan and pinch-to-zoom in or out. I have long been a bit annoyed how awkward it was to show people my web galleries on my iPad but now it is a smooth experience! In the end, I suppose the Lightroom update totally breaking TTG Highslide was a blessing in disguise, although had I not found jAlbum, I might have come to a different conclusion! Here is a side-by-side comparison of the Lightbox view between my previous TTG Highslide gallery and the new jAlbum gallery…

Click on the above image for a larger view in a new window or tab.

jAlbum also has a ton of features to integrate with social media, Google and more, most of which I am not using. A higher tier version of jAlbum allows commercial use with shopping carts for clients to buy images and there are also packages with image hosting as well, but since I’ve had a hosted website for many years now, I did not need that.

So there you have it: my journey working with numerous different web gallery creation packages. Hopefully this has been useful, or least maybe a bit inspiring! I find it rewarding to share my photos with friends and family and even though I am not using this commercially, I am also happy to be able to build a unique and personalized web gallery look that’s integrated with my blog.

Lastly, I have now remade all of my galleries from my trip to Germany in 2022, so if you want to see more of jAlbum, here are the relevant blog postings of mine: http://www.mikemander.com/search/label/DE2022