I was looking around for a free photo gallery to put on my Christmas site. Hoping that people would send me their photos for inclusion, so I could have a bunch of Christmas photos that would inspire people to decorate their homes. There are few things more magical than seeing a home lavishly decorated with Christmas decorations.

So I checked out the well-known Gallery2. But it needed a MySQL database. I have already used up my database allowance at my hosting account, with this blog, my Sydney Photos site, and I’ve planned the other for a separate Christmas function.

So I ended up with TinyWebGallery, an XML-based photo gallery. I’ve installed it as my Christmas Decorations Photo Gallery, but despite all the traffic to the site (currently only page 1 at Google, and page 2 at Yahoo, although it used to be #1 at both), no one has sent me any photos yet. It really just has some photos of the Christmas windows at David Jones in the city, that I took with my camera phone. So I need some more.

I had a few hiccups installing the free open-source PHP program. I installed it, and it didn’t work. Then the next day, it did come up, but admin didn’t work. Then the next day, admin did work. I still haven’t got the basic login functions working, but I can upload photos, and people can view and page through the site, so that’s enough for now. It was a big help manually deleting the cached photos from the cache folder.

Check it out.