gallery

Kingston's low-key but interesting Icons of Photography site uses a monthly magazine format to make the most of a relatively shallow content pool. Over the past year and a half, it's parlayed the four pros--Harry Benson, Colin Finlay, Gerd Ludwig, and Peter Read Miller--into 11 issues by doling out bite-sized chunks of editorial.

Accompanying each piece you'll find a handful of photos, representative of the work of the pro or the amateur supplicant. Calling them galleries would be a gross overstatement: they're five-photo, completely text-free slide shows. If the idea were to present the photos in an elegant manner, that would be one thing. But the huge, distracting Kingston logo banner and ad ruin any chance of that. So a label with the name of the photographer, and perhaps some EXIF data, might be nice.

There are four basic types of stories, all targeted toward the interested amateur. The feature "20 Questions" presents brief interviews with pros, that makes an interesting two-minute read for the uninitiated. It's a bit frustrating, though. For instance, when Harry Benson discusses his famous image of the Beatles' pillow fight, a link to or inclusion of the photo would have been really nice.… Read more

.Mac, the popular Web services suite from Apple is getting an update this morning. Among the newer features is a much-needed upgrade to .Mac's Web photo gallery service, which now ties in with the freshly updated iPhoto '08 and the iPhone. Users will also be able to upload photos to their online galleries via a specialized e-mail address. The new iPhone integration mirrors some of the options that are already in place to shuttle off photos from the device, with a new option to "send to Web gallery," which lets you send photos to their.Mac Web … Read more

A bit late to the party and wearing surprisingly Web 1.0 clothing, Pentax today launched the beta of its new Photo Gallery--a place where your photography can see and be seen right along with the pros, but very much in an old-fashioned, lone surfer, gallery atmosphere .

The Gallery has a curator of sorts, and at least initially, posting is by her invitation only. You can solicit an invitation with an e-mail to photogallery@pentax.com, at which point she'll provide you with the magic log-in or gently (I hope) turn you away and point you to Flickr or some other populist photo site. And the possibility of rejection--a key nonmonetary differentiator between the amateur and the pro--makes you feel like you're playing in the big leagues.

Being approved for posting, however, doesn't guarantee you can display anything you want; every image posted must be OK'd by the gatekeeper. However, once you've been approved, you can vote on other people's work for elevation to the Premiere Collection.

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Taking digital pictures is simple; transforming them into a constructive project is a whole 'nother story. Web services like Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Webshots, Snapfish, and countless others let you create photo galleries that are hosted on their servers, but what if you want to create a gallery for your own Web site?

Personally, I'm the sort of guy who wants to start with my raw images and my trusty NoteTab Light text editor, but I seem to have lost my patience for HTML and CSS (not to mention JavaScript and XML) over the last five years.… Read more

Galleries of images set off against a black background have become common as software and Web sites try to help people show off their photos better. Cooliris' PicLens offers a clever way to do set up such galleries from many Web sites on the fly.

The PicLens browser extension can convert a bunch of images from Google and Yahoo image search, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and RSS Media-based sites and other locations into a full-screen gallery of pictures. The photos slide by at a stately pace or advance when the user clicks the keyboard's arrow key, and a handy filmstrip … Read more