As you may have read, I’ve been playing with Apple’s Aperture software lately and really like it, with the exception of the ‘Web page’ export features. As an experience web developer and designer I was less than enthusiastic about the results I was getting. I looked into creating my own templates but it seems very cumbersome and seemingly not well thought out. I still intend to play with it some more, maybe the templating will improve in the next version, but while I do, I needed a way to get my photos up and on-line quickly with minimal effort and preferably a decent presentation. I whipped up a very quick PHP/ImageMagik/Lighbox script that fit the bill quite nicely. All I have to do now is create a directory and upload images into it and the script handles the rest. For pretty URLS, it also requires an Apache rewrite file. You can see an example here (Minty Photos!).

The script is very simple and I plan on extending it further, adding more features such as reading the EXIF info from the JPEG files to add comments and such. All in all it’s pretty handy and I’ve dubbed it SnappyAlbums and have provided a download link for you to enjoy. I have no intention of ever writing a back-end or administration area for it, the only thing I want to do is use FTP to create folders and upload pictures, the rest, if anything, I’ll do in Aperture or similar image editing software.