Overview: a pretty, easy, usable photo gallery

My needs for my photo gallery are / were:

• Pretty and matches the rest of the site - preferrably integrated into Rapidweaver so I don't lose the cool ability to change themes instantly
• Easy to maintain and add pictures - we used to use Gallery which used a mysql database to store all sorts of meta info and comments, etc
• Snappy and streamlined for the user once the page is loaded - I don't like having to click to another screen to see larger images that loses the context of the whole album
• Simple setup that requires little coding and/or code learning by me would have been nice
• Free . . .

Is that really too much to ask for? Trying to achieve this has been really difficult and time consuming.

One major issue/blessing is that all my pictures are on Skipper (my Windows box) which has more ram and more hard drive space and Picasa of course.

I tried to just pop an iFrame into a Rapidweaver page so I could create albums on Skipper and just link to them, but the iFrame confines the full image size within in the frame which was not very pretty.

I also tried using Rapidweaver pages (and some plugins) but when Rapidweaver manages many external files like images it gets really annoying. Especially if you move or rename the file on your hd, it tells you so... every... time... you... save...

So in the end, I think this will be my final solution: use Picasa's Export as HTML feature using a modified Highslide JS Picasa template, then copy and paste the generated HTML into a Rapidweaver page. It was a little more complicated than that. I'll give more details later once I have it more ironed out.

See the results

Did I mention that I also tried JAlbum and when I went to remove some files I had added to a test album by selecting them and pressing delete it deleted wiped my pictures from my hard drive?