If one has been on the internet for 3 seconds, it is obvious that dynamic photo galleries are useful and popular things.  After all, who wants to scroll through pages of pictures when they can all be loaded into one interface that can be controlled like a CD player (remember those…)?

Historically, the best photo galleries have been handled by Flash.  After all, it is a super easy thing to do, can be highly stylized and customized, and just generally works well.  The attendant problem,  however, has been two-fold.  Although generally lightweight, Flash is still pretty bulky, and as Interent Explorer has made us painfully aware, is not always treated with open arms by browsers.  Second, unless one has gone to trouble of coding to read an XML file, or is using remoting to connect to a database, Flash is just a pain to manage and can be time consuming to make simple additions, deletions, etc.

In recent years, some very good javascript alternatives have popped up.  While some are far better than others, the appeal of all is that they are generally less bandwidth expensive than flash and can be *more easily* modified than their flash alternatives.  

Spry has made its More >