Flash photo galleries are becoming a popular feature for
webmasters to add to websites. Depending on your
preference, you can simply add a image gallery to your
website as a subpage content, or make your entire website
purely a photo album.

There are more solutions (both free and commercial) for
building a photo gallery. If you are a professional
photographer need to display your work to potential
clients, then your requirement for the photo gallery
software or gallery website would be very different from an
amateur who just need to have fun, or someone who just want
to share photos with the social community.

Many business owners need a photo gallery for their
website because they are selling service or products --
e.g. a photographer would like to demonstrate his previous
photos online. A real estate website would like to display
house for sale online, etc.

For personal users, there are many image sharing sites
around which are easy to use for users to be up and running
in no time. However, many personal website owners also
prefer to have a photo gallery on their own website for
secuirty and privacy reasons, so that they can display
their photos without having to upload the photos to a third
part photo sharing website. This is particularly important
for webmasters whose photos need to be licensed or
protected.

If you are looking for the quick-and-easiest way to build a
gallery, a flash photo gallery software should be the best
solution. In the old days, programmers mainly use
JavaScript and PHP to build photo galleries. However the
programming involved is too complex for most webmasters and
business site owners.

A Flash gallery software can help anyone to build a flash
photo gallery with just few clicks on their PC, and then
upload the files to their own hosting account directly.
The simplest way to add a photo gallery to your website is
to add a new page to your website, and then choose a "Flash
Photo Gallery Template" from your photo gallery software.
Most flash gallery software comes with a variety of flash
photo gallery templates for you to choose. You can then
simply browser to your image folder or image files, to have
the photo gallery software automatically copy and insert
the images into the flash photo album.

Most flash album creator can also allow you to add special
animation effects to your photos. It transforms your
digital photo collection to a flash photo album with
animation effect, music and color theme. You can then
upload the flash web album with ftp program to your own
website or blog.

Some hosting companies provides a hosted photo gallery
application. This makes image galleries applications easy
to use. However the disadvantage is that you must stay with
the same web hosting company if you want to keep your flash
photo album. If you decide to switch your host, then all
your flash picture galleries are lost, and you would have
to rebuild your entire flash photo libraray again. This is
the main reason why you should consider using your own
flash gallery software. Which you can install directly on
your computer, create a flash photo album and upload it to
your own website or blog, and host the files anywhere.