Web Profiles

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I n the May issue, I introduced you to a low or no cost way to build a photography website using Exhibit Engine (http://photography-on-the.net/ee/) software. Some of you e-mailed to say that you've tried similar gallery applications but found they had too many features and wanted something simpler. One reader even decided to do something about it and came up with his own Flash/PHP photo gallery program.

Renaissance Man
Bill Wadman calls his program PhotoFolio (www.billwadman.com/photofolio) and it lets you create web pages that can be customized with colors, sizes, and sounds. A PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) script grabs the names of all subdirectories next to it and calls them albums. Next, it gets a listing of all the JPEG files in those directories and sends all this information into a Flash movie, effectively creating a portfolio from the files on the server. The program automatically replaces underscores with spaces so you can have spaces in album and image names. If this sounds all geeky to you, it's really not and PhotoFolio makes posting new photographs a snap. All you have to do is make a new directory and drop some JPEG files into it.

Oh yeah, PhotoFolio is free but he asks for a small donation ($10) if you use and like it. We should support people like Wadman who are not only creative photographers but talented programmers, too. Thanks Wadman and a tip of the Farace fedora for sharing your expertise.

To see how PhotoFolio works in a real-world environment, check out the classy and clever images displayed on Wadman's photography site (www.billwadman.com/photography). This dude is a true renaissance man. After you've looked at PhotoFolio in action, go to his main site (www.billwadman.com) to see some of his other photographs and listen to some of his music, including original compositions.