These days, Web sites are as much about images as words. Many home office users could make good use of images to enhance their web sites, but many of the tools available are complex, expensive and difficult and time-consuming to learn. Useful applications for commercial use include the opportunity to provide high quality catalogues
Coffee Cup PhotoGallery is one of a range of applications from the company that offers simple tools to manipulate Flash-based multimedia content. The product is available as a free trial with a $39 license fee beyond the trial period. Whilst this may appear to be a single function product, in
reality it combines photo conversion from a range of formats including .GIF, .JPG, .PNG, .BMP and from thence to the Flash format, basic web page development and FTP facilities to upload the files to your server.
At its most basic, the application is remarkably simple.
1. First, select your theme.See the dialog box here 
2. Then import your pictures either as individual files or as a folder. See the dialog box here
See the main screen
3. Add captions if required.
4. Generate the files needed to produce the photo gallery.
5. Upload the files to your server using either the inbuilt FTP client or a stand-alone FTP client.
However, there are a range of options to further enhance the resulting galleries. There are two different tabs of options covering both the thumbnail strips and the main gallery. These options include facilities to change transitions, speed or slow transitions, add background audio, fonts on buttons, border color and the transition itself.
Sample galleries showing what can be achieved are available at http://www.coffeecup.com/photo-gallery/sample/1/.
View the sample gallery
The attractiveness of this application is the professional effects that can be achieved with remarkable simplicity. The wide range of templates supplied means that a gallery can
be developed to meet the needs of a wide range of applications. The use of Flash brings cross-platform compatibility
Caveats are limited to the usual comment about CoffeeCup software applications that the supplied HTML code is not W3C compliant, but previous articles in this series have shown how this may be addressed.