The Photo Gallery offered in Afteroffice hosting package is using SmoothGallery as the front-end, and being improved tremendously at the backend to bring greatest ease of use for the webmasters and the users.

To build a photo gallery on Afteroffice hosted website is as easy as uploading a folder with many image files in it. The server will take care of the rest, including generating the thumbnails, constructing the necessary layout and even resize large images to smaller more web friendly in order for ease of browsing.

It can even produced a standard html file in your photo folder, so that you can refer to that file for further customization, or faster reload when you just want to use the same photo gallery again and again.

Upload a folder of images onto the top of your web directory – for example: “myphoto”. The image files can be any that end with .jpg, .gif and .png

Type the following URL in the browser:
http://www.mydomain.tld/cgi-bin/vo/smoothgallery.cgi.vo?folder=/myphoto
Where www.mydomain.tld is your actual domain name.
You should immediately see a photo gallery being built for browsing.

To resize the photos (in the case they are too big), use the same URL above, just added a “preview” parameter after it, like:
http://www.mydomain.tld/cgi-bin/vo/smoothgallery.cgi.vo?folder=/myphoto&preview=300x200
Where 300×200 here is the width and the height of the photo that you would like to resize to.

If the “preview” option is not given, the server will display the photo in full size, and it'll takes the first photo as the size reference to create the photo gallery area.

[For more advance user]
To add title and remark in the photo, simply create a text file along side with the photo file, name it exactly like the photo file name, but use the .txt as the suffix instead.
For example, if you have a photo file name as “event.jpg”, your remark file would be named as “event.txt”.
In the content of the text file, make sure you have something like the following:
<subject>My event</subject>
<detail>This is my event at 1st Jan, 2007</detail>

It looks like a form of HTML, but it can be really easy to edit as long as you have something to start with.
If you would like to added link to the photo (allow user to click on it and jump to other page), add the following text in the remark file:
<link>http://www.some-interesting-place.tld</link>

To overwrite the CSS in the document, use “ccs” parameter. To overwrite the gallery object initial value, use the “init” parameter. For detail of the css and init parameter, refer to Smoothgallery source code.

CGI call: http://web.afteroffice.com/cgi-bin/vo/smoothgallery.cgi.vo?folder=/html/doc/photo_sample

Direct access: http://web.afteroffice.com/html/doc/photo_sample

1. up to 160 photo files in a folder allowed.
2. only .jpg, .gif and .png image file are supported.
3. the server will generate a new folder “_tn” inside of your photo folder to store thumbnail images. You have to remove the folder manually if you have decided not to use the photo gallery later.
4. the server will generate a new folder “_pr” if you use the “preview” option, and store all the resized photos in there - it can takes quite some disk space sometime for this folder as the server will not remove the original photos. Make sure you have sufficient disk space for these operations, and removed the “_pr” folder manually once you don't need the photo gallery anymore.

Afteroffice Service
September 2007