There are many solutions (both free and commercial) for building a photo gallery. If you are a professional photographer need to display your work to potential clients, then your requirement for the photo gallery software or gallery website would be very different from an amateur who just need to have fun, or someone who just want to share photos with the social community.

Many business owners need a photo gallery for their website because they are selling service or products -- e.g. a photographer would like to demonstrate his previous work online. A real estate website would like to display house for sale online, etc.

For personal users, there are lots of photo sharing sites around which are generally easy to use and you can be up and running in no time. However, many personal website owners also prefer to have a photo gallery on their own website for secuirty and privacy reasons, so that they can display their photos without having to upload the photos to a third part photo sharing website. This is particularly important for webmasters whose photos need to be licensed or protected.

If you are looking for the quick-and-easiest way to build a gallery, a flash photo gallery software should be the best solution. In the old days, programmers mainly use JavaScript and PHP to build photo galleries. However the programming involved is too complex for most webmasters and business site owners.

A Flash photo gallery software can help anyone to build a flash gallery with just few clicks on Windows desktop, and then upload the files to their own hosting account directly. The simplest way to add a photo gallery to your website is to add a new page to your website, and then choose a "Flash Photo Gallery Template" from your photo gallery software. Most flash gallery software comes with a variety of flash photo gallery templates for you to choose. You can then simply browser to your image folder or image files, to have the photo gallery software automatically copy and insert the images into the flash photo album.

Most flash album creator can also allow you to add special animation effects to your photos. It transforms your digital photo collection to a flash photo album with animation effect, music and color theme. You can then upload the flash web album with ftp program to your own website or blog.

Some web hosting companies have free image galleries application included. This makes image galleries applications easy to use. However the disadvantage is that you must stay with the same web hosting company if you want to keep your flash photo album. If you decide to switch your host, then all your flash picture galleries are lost, and you would have to rebuild your entire flash photo libraray again.

This is the main reason why you should consider using your own flash gallery software Which you can install directly on your computer, create a standalone flash photo album and upload it to your own website or blog, and host the files anywhere.