Picasa is a great photo management app on the desktop. The one-click photo fixing (which actually works very well), the fluid UI, the numerous printing options, and the fact that it’s free make it hard to beat. Since I’ve been using Picasa to manage my photos offline for a long time, it was only natural that I would try the “Export to HTML” option to publish my photo albums online. It worked pretty well for a while, but there were limitations.

Since the “Export to HTML” feature (not to be confused with Picasa Web Albums publishing) simply produces static HTML pages, maintaining lots of albums quickly becomes quite cumbersome. For instance, changing the look-and-feel involves republishing each album individually after making changes to the template. And since there’s no central administration section, adding and removing pictures, or adding captions either involves republishing or going in and editing the HTML manually.

I had encountered zenphoto before, but never actually realized what a great management interface it has. The online demo doesn’t allow you to login to the admin section, which is what I think really makes this thing shine. Thanks to a tip from Omar, I decided to try it out myself, and I loved what I saw. Creating a new album is dead simple - just upload all the pictures to the albums directory via FTP/SFTP, or use the admin pages to upload a ZIP file containing all the pictures. This simplicity, combined with the smart use of AJAX throughout, powerful templating support, and support for comments was enough to make me switch all my existing albums over.

If you’re looking for a PHP+MySQL based photo gallery, I would highly recommend downloading a copy of zenphoto and trying it out for yourself.