Gallery by Menalto was my favorite web gallery package for years, but active development and support for it ended over 5 years ago. I kept my instance running for a while, but eventually gave up and archived it. I had lots going on in my life, so put off actively looking for an alternative until recently.

My first try was to using a mediawiki site and their bulk uploader plugin. While there is a lot to like about wikis, I quickly concluded that photo galleries were not their thing. Back to the drawing board.

Searching online identified these three candidates:

I began experimenting with a depth-of-field extension technique today called Focus Stacking. Analogous to HDR in some respects, this technique takes a set of images with overlapping zones of sharp focus and combines them into a single image exhibiting crisp focus throughout.

Further look at slide / film scanners:

Flat Bed

One of the big surprises in my current quest for scanners is that flatbeds have jumped up in quality to be serious alternatives in the scanner wars. They can do anywhere from 4 - 12 slides at a time and work with popular scanner control software, e.g., VueScan or SilverFast. Following are a few that caught my attention.

Maybe this is an alternative to outside slide scanning services? See B&H's page on it.

My CanoScan FS4000US has broken down for the second time and I am thinking of scrapping it. Unfortunately new, high-resolution slide scanners are very expensive, so I will first try some of the slide scanning services.

Google search for "slide scanning service" yields these (and several thousand more):

I have a reasonably large collection of images catalogued in Adobe Lightroom (version 2.6 at time of this writing), but only a very few of them geocoded.

Here is a movie I did today in Camtesia for mac on using Jeffrey Friedl's LR to flickr plugin:

In my earlier article, Slideshows in a Digital Age. I talk about the need to resize images down to something that resembles the projectors inherent resolution. The idea is that since a good projector can only handle 1024 x 768 pixels, embedding a picture bigger than that only strains powerpoint and your hard drive — the projector still only puts 1024 x 768 pixels onto the screen.

So here’s a quick and easy approach for Mac users if you don’t want to fire up either Lightroom, Aperture or Photoshop:

The earlier article on digital slideshows focused on some key differences between the old 35mm slideshows and today's digital presentations, and spent some time on the importance of the resolution of the digital slide projector. Today's piece looks at the software part. Now that you have your folder full of "right-sized" images, what do you do with them? What are the commonly-used programs, what features do they offer, and how do you choose?

Life used to be simpler. In the old days, when I wanted to put on a slide show, I just gathered up my 35mm slides, arranged them in a Kodak Carousel tray (or two), and headed off to do the show. Everyone had carousel projectors and screens. There were some worries, but they seem minor: