The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: Myriad Software/ Product page
- Price: Free
Galerie has a ton of features; to name just a few, you can: specify what text is associated with both thumbnails and larger images (comments, EXIF, date, etc.); set the horizontal and vertical spacing of thumbnails; add a watermark; add the full-sized images to the upload (optionally zipped); set the size of thumbnails and larger images; upload to your FTP server automatically; and much, much more. In addition to all the album setup features, you can choose from 18 different templates that control the appearance of your album. If that's not enough, you can download 50 more free templates. Many of the templates use CSS for styling, and can thus be easily customized.
The program is also very new-user-friendly. There's an extensive user manual available from within the program, and each setting has a pop-up tooltip that further describes how it works.
One of the main things that made it easy for me to switch from jAlbum is Galerie's integration with iPhoto. Just create a selection in iPhoto, then switch to Galerie and click the Generate button. Galerie will automatically grab the images from iPhoto and create the album. With jAlbum, I had to manually export my images first. It will also work in this manner with selections in GraphicConverter, iView MediaPro, and Extensis Portfolio 7. You can also drag and drop files or folders from the Finder.
Macworld.com covered Galerie in a Mac Gems writeup a couple years back, but somehow I missed it. I wished I'd found it sooner; it's a great timesaver for me -- with two small kids in the house and no local family, I spend a lot of time making online photo albums! My only wish for Galerie is that it supported more than simple FTP as the upload mechanism; I use SFTP on our server, so I have to do the upload myself. But that's a very minor complaint for a well-documented, easy to use program -- and it's free!

