Productivity Sauce

Looking for a quick and easy way to set up a Web-based photo gallery? Consider GMFoto. This application lets you create a snazzy Web-based photo album literally in a matter of minutes.

Unlike many popular photo gallery applications, GMFoto doesn't use a database back-end, so it's dead-simple to install and configure. Grab the latest version of the application and unpack the downloaded archive into a directory (e.g., gmfoto). Now open the code/code.index.php file in a text editor and replace the loveunit_com string with the name of the resulting directory (in this case, it's gmfoto). Do the same in the index.php file in the user/00000 directory. The user/00000 directory also contains the settings.php file which you can use to tweak the gallery's settings. Here you can specify a gallery name and description, keywords, a Google Analytics account ID, a gallery skin, and thumbnail sizes.

Once GMFoto is configured, move the entire gmfoto directory into the document root of your server, and copy the folders containing photos to the user/00000 directory. Point your browser to http://yourserver/gmfoto/user/00000 and behold the gallery generated by GMFoto. Note that it may take a while for GMFoto to generate thumbnails for the photos, so you may have to wait a bit for the gallery to appear in the browser.

GMFoto supports multiple users (it comes with two default user directories: 00000 and 00001). If you want to add a new user, simply clone the entire 0000 or 0001 directory and edit the index.php file as described above.

GMFoto is not the most advanced photo gallery software out there, but if you need to turn your photo collection into a slick photo album with a minimum of effort, this application will do the trick just fine.

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