When I first started putting photographs online, I spent ages looking for an album creation tool that would give me some control but would automate a lot of the creation. I eventually settled on JAlbum - a nice tool written in Java that has many downloadable skins to choose from. You can see an album that uses JAlbum here.
More recently however I discovered two Flash based image viewers both from Airtight Interactive - AutoViewer and SimpleViewer.
AutoViewer allows you to create a line of images spreading from left to right. It will show the images as a slide show, or allow the user to click through them one by one. The images are shown at full size, unless the browser window is too small at which point the Flash viewer does a great job at scaling them down. Example AutoViewer album.
SimpleViewer creates a thumbnail matrix for your images, and allows you to view full size versions by clicking the thumbnails. Again, the images scales if necessary. Example SimpleViewer album.
One nice feature is that the images are intelligently cached when the page loads. This minimizes wait time for the end user and it is a great user experience too if you click on images that are not yet downloaded and cached.
Both are controlled by a single XML file that includes all of the options for the album as well as the image list.
I spent a little time writing a very crude application to allow me to create AutoViewer XML files very easily. For SimpleViewer, I actually used to use a JAlbum skin, but this only supports version 1.7.1. The current version is 1.8 and the XML format has changed a little. I just copy and paste an old album file and fix it up by hand right now. I hope to extend my "crude application" to cover SimpleViewer very soon!
