Magic Gallery

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Enjoy looking at photos and need a Photo Gallery on your website or even your personal computer? Proficient in Html but still need a template to speed things up? Sometimes you take a bunch of pictures and would like to arrange them in a pleasing display.

 

Magic Gallery 4.5.13 provides you with templates and allows you to effortlessly display your images in an html file. Publishing your pictures to the web is painless and directed with four easy steps.

 

First, select your pictures by clicking on Add Pictures. The picture will appear in the right pane to preview it. Repeat until you have chosen all your images. Click on Next. You will be taken to the Publishing options tab page. Here you mainly save it to either your computer or to a website via ftp. You can also send someone an email announcement telling them about your new Photo gallery. Click on Next again to Choose your template. Here you select one out of 12 templates included in the software. Each selection immediately shows a preview in the right-hand pane. Selecting Check for New Templates is supposed to take you to their online Raizlabs site for more templates to choose from. Clicking Next on this page produces a pop up entitled Enter text for your gallery.

 

This popup asks, âWhat is the name of your gallery? Below this is a textbox where you can enter the title of your gallery as well as describe your pictures as well. After hitting OK, you are taken to the final tab called Preview and edit. There is very limited editing here which includes the usual Bold, Italics, and Underlining of all selected text as well as limited change of font type and size. In addition, the color palette is there along with the addition of bullets numbered and unnumbered. When you are satisfied, click on Finish and wait a moment. Voila! An Internet Explorer browser appears before your eyes opening up an html file composed of your picture gallery.

 

Are you afraid that once you put your image up on the web, anyone can come along and steal it, claiming it as yours? Put a watermark on it by pressing Select Tools, then Edit Watermark and the Watermark Options page will popup. Choose the Watermark Type: No Watermark, Text Watermark, and Image Watermark. For Text Watermark, you type in whatever text you want to appear on your picture. Image Watermark allows you to open up a browse window where you can select a background image as a watermark and only here can select the level of transparency. A slider bar set farthest to the left, shows the watermark in all its glory. Setting the slider bar all the way to the right makes your watermark virtually disappear.

 

By going to Tools -> Options you can adjust how your gallery and thumbnails are produced. You have a slider bar with Smaller file on the low side to Higher Quality on the high scale. You can size your photos automatically with a template, custom size all photos or produce it at the original photo size. Be aware that the last option would be the slowest, as it would most probably use a huge amount of pixels, thereby making a very large file.

 

A strange thing occurred after the application was closed from the status bar. The Tip of the Day as well as the program appeared smaller in size- about 4â x 4â. Until a person realizes that you can grab the edges and pull it back to the size you want, it is a bit disconcerting.

 

Additional features:

Tip of the Day

User Forum â https://www.raizlabs.com/?s=asp+forum

Dynamically refresh Template List âF5

Additional languages for this program

Template folder â contains jpg preview files

Larger galleries âdirectly from Excel spreadsheets

FTP gallery to your website

 

The helpful information beneath each tab lets you know your options on that page. This is much better than trying to figure it out on your own. For those who do not know Html, this is a wonderful program allowing you in 4 easy steps to publish your picture images to the web, whether online or not. For those who do know Html it is a bit stiff to use. Would like to see a page dedicated to advanced users where they can play with the html directly to create the specific look they want.

 

In creating your magic gallery html file you are directed by the Next buttons which include brief description of your options beneath each tab page you enter. This directed navigation in creating a Picture Gallery is very much appreciated. One nice feature in the Preview and edit page is the ability to drag and drop the pictures and text just before you create the html gallery file.

 

There are some bugs and limitations to this program, however. For instance, the software may tell you it is looking for files ending in htm, when actually it has default as the name and the program wants you to rename the file. Also, while attempting to create a new magic gallery htm file, the program suddenly popped up a notice that the Magic Gallery has changed and would you like to save your work. Thereafter the application disappeared from the screen. Had to click on the icon and go to File-> Open to browse for my started work. Lastly, the freak change in size, could initially cause some concern. The bottom line is this: if a program is not stable, Magic Gallery has no business charging for it.

 

Magic Gallery is so simple to use, and even a guided path makes this Magic Gallery a must-have software. Nonetheless, with shareware we have come to expect lots of bells and whistles and even the ability to customize the software to our tastes- Magic Gallery has little of these. Hence, for this reason as well as its unstability, its rating suffers. Yes, $34.95 is a small price to pay for streamlined directed navigation in creating ones own picture gallery. Had the softwareâs authors spent a little more time including extra features, Magic Gallery would have been given rave reviews.

 

Here are some snapshots:

 

 

 

 

Here is the link to download a free trial copy of the latest Magic Gallery:

 

https://www.raizlabs.com/contact/support/