In searching for a photo sharing solution for my web site, I recently stumbled on dfGallery. If you’re not familiar with it, think SlideShowPro, only better. Why better? ‘Cuz you don’t have to fork over any of your hard-earned cash to be able to use it. Its free. True, it doesn’t have anything like SlideShowPro Director available for gallery management, but managing albums manually using the XML-based configuration file is pretty simple for even semi-geeks. I especially really like the fact that you can point it to RSS feeds from Flickr and Picasa Web Albums and it will display all of those photos for you as well (Fotki and Photobucket are also supported). Very nice feature.

A few minor drawbacks: its Flash based, which some people don’t like. I myself don’t see that as much of a problem because Flash on the web is much like Windows on the desktop…just about everybody has it. Due to the fact that it is flash-based though, you don’t get the ability to link directly to a specific photo though. Again, to me, this is a minor problem. If I want to show a specific photo, chances are, I’m going to embed it directly into a blog entry anyway.

So, if you’re looking for a nice, free solution for displaying photos on your web site, and you’re OK with using Flash for it, you might consider checking out dfGallery.