installing a gallery on my page

[shanrock]

  I am at a complete loss and it's taking over my life!! lol.  I've just built my first website ever, and I am stuck on the photo gallery.  The hosting company has told me that they recently had to disable that function as it wasn't working properly, but they tell me to upload some other program to 'some file' then add a new page and point it to my gallery page. I don't know what this means or how to do it at all.
I want people to look at my site, click on the 'photo gallery' link and then see the gallery....click on a picture and have a shadow box pop up and they can view the pictures.
I don't want a new window opening up with a gallery on a page that looks nothing like my website at all with some cheesy gallery set up.

I beleive that I have the shadow box files uploaded to my server correctly - I just don't know how to write the code so that it's functioning when my gallery get's up.  And I don't know how to get my gallery up and running.

So.....comes the price tag with all this help.  I dont know what's all involved here, time wise etc., so I don't know what is even appropriate to offer.  So i'll start at $50 and see where that gets me!

Here is my site www.shannonzastoupilphotography.com

Thanks for putting up with my ignorance!! 

[phill104]

Does your hosting meet the minimum requirements for Coppermine (does it include PHP and Sql - Details here

02: Web Server + PHP + MySQL + IM/GD = CPG!
Coppermine Photo Gallery has been tested to work well on IIS, Apache 1.3.24 onwards to the latest Apache 2, on Linux, UNIX, OSX, and Win32 systems. The following settings are required:

Good webserver (Apache recommended);
PHP (4.2.0 or better);
MySQL (3.23.23 or better; 4.x recommended);
either GD or ImageMagick (any version);

If so then what you are asking is quite simple. Installation of coppermine, a custom theme for which one of the existing ones can easilly be modified and adding a plugin such as EnlargeIt or one of the other lightbox plugins.

But what I wonder is if Coppermine is the right app for you? How many images do you wish in your gallery? Is it just to display images you upload? Coppermine is quite powerful and is designed to allow multipe users and multipe albums. It also needs maintaining and upgrading If you are just wanting to showcase some of your work then you might be better off with a flash based gallery or something similar.

*edit - Just to let you know, your site does not display correctly in IE8. You'll need to apply some fixes for that.

[shanrock]

Oh boy, I think I'm in way over my head, cuz your reply didn't even make sense to me. (but thank-you!)
What I do know is that in my control panel there are options for photo gallery downloads and coppermine was one of them, so I'm going to assume that they do support it.
I want to have about 5 galleries for different types of portraits (maternity, babies, toddlers, families & weddings)....and I will be uploading new ones periodically, this is so people can view my portfolio.

If Coppertmine isn't something that I should use can you suggest something that I should?  And where I would find it?

Also...for "fixes" so my site can work in IE8...is that a simple thing to do? Or do I need to get someone at my hosting company to help me with that?
I really appreciate your time!

[phill104]

One thing we cannot support are installs made via hosts control panels but I don't think that matters in your case as I do not believe coppermine is the best app for you. As well as installing it you would have to regularly update it (the software side) and have a theme built (the look to fit your site) etc. It seems you just want to show off your portfolio and as such I would recommend that yuo get someone to help you create a flash gallery to fit your site. Programs like Adobe's lightroom will do all the work for you and once you have got someone to do the code bit for you all you will have to do is genereate a new slideshow/gallery in lightroom (or similar app, there are loads of them some free others not) and upload the files it creates. Here is an example of one such site generated that way.

http://www.bdweddingphotography.co.uk/gallery.htm

Sorry we cannot help you with that.

Good luck with it

P.S. As I bought it up the IE8 thing is simple as adding the following meta tage in the head of your pages. This link explains it but again, that is something we cannot help you with.

http://acidmartin.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/using-the-ie8-x-ua-compatibility-meta-tag/

[shanrock]

Thank-you so much for explaining this in layman's terms. I am extremely grateful for your help!!

[shanrock]

By the way....the photos you linked me to are absolutely astounding!