Picture galleries (especially those that display family photo albums) at times seem to be taking over the Web. Many jokes have been made about the huge volume of the transmission of baby pictures will eventually bring the Web to its knees. The desire to share digital pictures and the ability of geographically separated family members to share in the lives of their loved ones makes a compelling case for digital picture galleries.

Whether you want to display a professional photo portfolio or post snapshots of your daughter’s first steps, Joomla can provide the solution. Joomla can host picture galleries through a number of extensions. In fact, galleries are among the most popular types of plug-ins on the Joomla system. At last count, a Google search could locate at least 50 different picture gallery extensions for Joomla, both free and commercial.

The RSGallery2 extension is the most highly rated native gallery extension and is very rich in features. It provides professional gallery and image management, integrated access control with Joomla’s user registration system, and availability in almost two dozen languages.

If you are looking to manage a large volume of digital photos, be sure to look at the Gallery2 system. It is one of the most popular gallery applications on the Web and provides many professional features. It includes automatic RSS generation, comments features, and support for many media types (not only pictures), and has shown the capability to scale on popular Web sites. Although it is a standalone PHP application, it can be included within a Joomla site by using the Gallery 2 Bridge plug-in.

The RSGallery2 extension is written for native-Joomla execution. The rendered HTML and CSS are standards-compliant. It also has complete support of Joomfish for language display. It can even manage Flash content! Before you install the extension, ensure that you have at least one of the popular image generation libraries (GD2, ImageMagick, or Netpbm) active on your PHP server.

RSGallery2 has a control panel that allows access to all the configuration panels of the extension. From here, you can configure the system, upload (singly or in bulk) images, organize galleries, edit display options, or manage the image database. Additionally, the CSS editing option allows you to customize the presentation to match your current site template.

You may want to visit the RSGallery2 home page (http://rsgallery2.net/index.php). On the site, you can download the extension, see a demo implementation of a gallery, read or post to the forum dedi- cated to the extension, or learn from the tutorials available there. There are tutorials for everything from deploying the extension to building custom modules to creating a gallery template. The site also holds API documentation that details all of the classes held in the RSGallery2 framework.