iPowerWeb has an easy installation of Gallery. It is simple to install through iPW, but once you have to configure it, things get a bit trickier. Gallery is also available for download free from the Gallery homepage, but you will need to install it on your server yourself if you go this route. Explaining that is beyond the scope of this page.

This page will cover basic features, and configuration tips to get Gallery up and running. We still have not changed the layout in our gallery, and will add those instructions as soon as we have done it.

You can install Gallery through your iPW control panel. Once you have done that, you'll need to configure it. Gallery comes with documentation that tells you how to get into the configuration controls. But you'll run into a problem when you try to save the changes.

You can set up the gallery to behave the way you want it to through the config panel. Some of the options are:

• How many images across the page, and how many per page total.
• How large the thumbnails are.
• Which information fields you want included - photographer, description, etc.
• Whether or not you will allow other people to create new albums and upload images.
• How the registration for new members is handled.
• Which types of image editing features you want to have enabled.

Gallery is quite powerful, and allows you to set up a full featured image gallery fairly rapidly. And it allows quite a bit of flexibility in how it is done. But all of this is no good unless you can access the ability to save the config info.

I kept getting told that I did not have the privileges to write to the config file. The solution outlined in the Gallery instructions was not helping any, since their solution was not one that I wanted to adopt - it would have meant giving full access to write functions to the entire Gallery folder, and that was unacceptable to me. So I devised a workaround.

When you get to the end of the config setup, you'll get a page that has the config php code written out on it. If you copy JUST that code off the page, you can then paste it into the config.php file in place of the existing code - just make sure you match up the start and end tags, and only replace the part that is identical at the beginning and end. Some of the specific info in the middle will be different (because you changed it when you made all those setting changes), but you'll recognize similarities in the code.

The config.php file can be edited with any plain text editor such as Notepad, TextEdit, or SimpleText. You'll find the config.php file in your Gallery folder on your server. You may be able to edit it directly on your server if your FTP program allows that, or you might want to download it to your desktop, edit it, and re-upload it.

You can batch upload images in several ways, and Gallery does a good job of helping to save you time during initial setup when you have a ton of images to upload the first time. The help files that you'll find in the Gallery folder will instruct you on how to do many of the tasks you'll want to do.

Gallery has the ability to change the appearance, and to add a menu to link it to other areas in your site, or to put in ads, or other features so that it can function as a full commercial solution. I have not got that far with it yet, because I have so many sites to work on right now, both of my own and for clients, that I have not yet had the time to move Gallery to the top of my "to-do" list. Somehow the list seems to grow faster than I can cross things off!

If you use Gallery and have information that might make this page more useful, please email and let me know. Also if you have questions about using Gallery that you cannot find answers to, please email and ask me, and I'll go look up the answers. I'll add more info to this page as I learn.