Gallery comes with a handy web based configuration wizard. This wizard helps to make sure that your web server and operating system are set up correctly. It allows you to configure many of Gallery's options while determining as much as it can from your environment. The wizard will create an admin account for you. This is a special account that allows you to create other user accounts, create albums, and set album permissions.

You start off with only one user, the Administrator (login name: admin). This account can do anything with Gallery. Typically you'll want to use the admin to create other users. Users can be granted permission to create and maintain their own albums.

If you have the appropriate permissions, you can add photos to an album. You can add them one at a time or up to 10 at a time using the "Add Photos" dialog. If your server has ZIP file support, a faster alternative is to upload a ZIP file full of photos and movies. A third option is to specify a web page and let Gallery go and slurp all the photos and movies off of that page for you (it'll let you pick which ones you want). A fourth option is to copy images to your web server and let Gallery copy them directly into your album. As photos and movies are added to the album, Gallery will resize and make thumbnails of them for you.

Gallery also allows you have albums within albums so you can organize sets of albums together. You can choose which album you want to be the highlight, just as if it were a photo. You can move albums and ranges of photos in and out of other albums.

A photo or movie is the basic unit of Gallery. Photos and movies are grouped together into albums. Once you have the photos in your album the fun begins. Typically an intermediate resized version and a thumbnail of the image are created for you. You can:

Each album's appearance can be customized by its owner in a variety of ways. You can change the title, colors, background, fonts, and borders. You can also specify a target thumbnail size and a target intermediate photo size (so that folks with lesser bandwidth can view scaled versions of big photos). The number of rows and columns in an album is customizable, as well as a variety of viewer options.

Gallery lets you mirror your albums on as many remote servers as you like. This lets you run your Gallery on a machine with limited bandwidth (like over a DSL line) but still serve up your images quickly from a high bandwidth source like an ISP. Gallery will not actually mirror the files for you. You're responsible for doing it yourself. I use a program called rsync. You can use whatever you want. If the remote album is up to date, Gallery will use it. If not, Gallery will use the local one.

Gallery comes with a Java application called Gallery Remote (more information) that your users can use to upload photos to your Gallery via a drag-and-drop interface. You can download Gallery Remote from the Download Page

A user (provided the admin allows it) can create a new album. This user (the creator of the album) is the album's owner and can modify the album's permissions. You can grant read, write, modify and delete permissions to individual users on a per-album basis. Owners and the Administrator always have all permissions.

Gallery is compatible with Nuke 5.0+ and Post-Nuke as an add-on module. Simply put your gallery directory inside the Nuke modules directory and you're all set. All the regular Gallery features will work properly while embedded inside Nuke, and Gallery will have the same look and feel as the rest of your Nuke site.

You can change much of Gallery's look with style sheets. You can also wrap it inside your own website in a seamless fashion (example 1, example 2) using our HTML wrapping system. The one thing you can't easily do right now is to change the layout from a grid format to something else. However, in v2.0 we plan to introduce a templating system that will let you write your own HTML to do customized themes and layouts (or use the ones that we and other users provide). You can find out more about MANY more customizations further down in the user guide underneath the Customization area

Users viewing your album can easily navigate around using the navigation bars at the top and bottom of every album page. Each album can be given its own unique URL. Each photo within the album in turn has its own unique URL. You can use these URLs to get directly to a specific photo from outside the Gallery (useful when you want to email photo links to a friend). In addition to this, the album owner can allow the user to use the following features: