Creating on-line photo albums can be very simple. Leaving it’s strange name aside, Glenlay is so simple and produces such a great result, it is hard to beat.

Downloading:
Click on the link below to start the download, save it somewhere on your local drive (“My Downloads”), wait for it to finish, then double-click the file (glenlay20.exe) and let it install itself. It will show up on your desktop as “Glenlay Gallery”.

Click Glenlay Gallery to download the file

Caveat: after some further use, note that the original images get uploaded, as well as the re-sized images. That can make for a VERY large upload (like 300mb in my case....), so it would pay to re-size the photos down to a reasonable size before using Glenlay to build the album (see “High Quality Photo Re-Sizer”). Note also sometimes you can’t right-click the image (it’s actually the little thumbnail image) to edit the picture or description. A bug. You also can’t re-load an existing ‘album’, because essentially there isn’t one - it works in and out of your original (or re-sized) directory. Photo descriptions become separate .html files that get merged when you re-build the album. It works fine, just not what you expect.

Note too that you can’t be selective about which photos get included and which don’t - the entire directory (and sub-sirectories I think) always feature in the resulting album. Again, fine, but something to be aware of. Organise the directories carefully.
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Using it:

To use it, double-click the icon, then select a gallery type - I like “Thumbnail Gallery Left”, but you can choose from the list and see an immediate result. Choose a colour scheme - I liked Maroon. Click “Continue”.

 

In “Album Name” enter a suitable title for the result - such as “Fred’s Holiday”. In The ‘Folder to read images from’, click the browse icon and find your file folder that has all the photos. In The ‘folder to put album to’, do the same but select a spare folder the program can use to store the resulting files that will be stored and uploaded.

 

At this point the program has all it needs to create a picture show. However, you can add to the usefulness of the result by adding descriptions to each photo - by default it uses the photo name. If you want to see the result, click the ‘Put a shortcut on the desktop’ link - it will create the slideshow and (as you would expect) puts a link on your desktop to the resulting files. These slide show programs generally all create a web-compatible result - the first file is called index.html and the desktop link is to that file. Once you click the link, the slide show opens in your browser (eg Firefox or Internet Explorer) just as if it was on the web.

 

If you have a website and know the login details, Glenlay Gallery is clever enough to load the slide show directly to your website. You need to fill in the FTP (file transfer protocol) details as above (the ones above are only for example), then click the continue button. It will take a while, but the result looks great and this is a very simple way to create a slide show.

The advantage of a program such as this is that it does all the hard work of resizing your photos to ‘web friendly’ sizes - you just tell it where the originals are and it does the rest. Much easier than manually resizing all those files.