Friday, February 8, 2013

Porta and SimpleViewer

When it comes to generating online photo galleries, I've always used Porta. It's simple, easy to use, lightweight, and super fast. And it comes bundled with SimpleViewer v1.4, which serves as the front-end of the gallery. Only downside is the software hasn't been updated for a while now.

There's a new version of SimpleViewer out (v2.31) which supports Javascript fallback for those mobile devices that don't support Flash anymore. I tried to integrate the new SimpleViewer with Porta, but it just doesn't work. The gallery.xml structure has changed so much, it's just not worth the effort of renaming the files generated by Porta, then manually putting in the captions. Instead of Porta, I did try using the bundled svBuilder AIR app, but there is no watermarking and it wasn't able to extract the captions, even though that option is enabled.

Best option I've found is to get Picasa to export the pictures using the SimpleViewer template. Definitely takes longer than Porta though. What I've also noticed is that the latest SimpleViewer freeware has a limit of 50 photos per gallery. No such limitation with v1.4.

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