jAlbum

I've been using JAlbum since a few years after its introduction. It continues to get better each year and is unmatched in quality and functionality. The skins are excellent, and the support I have received regarding customization and issue resolution has been nothing short of amazing. You can see my albums at https://edgewoodgardens.net/image-galleries/.

I have been using jAlbum on my own paid-for host servers since 2013. It is an excellent product that is continually and meaningfully improved and does quite well precisely what it was intended for: it enables users who have minimal programming skills to create individual well organized, scalable, professional, nice looking web-based photo albums that are easy to maintain. More important, the team at jAlbum have always, ALWAYS been responsive, helpful, and patient. Requests for support or advice are answered almost in real time, and are always helpful, even sometimes including a snippet or two of custom code that lets me do something differently than was intended. In sum, I use a lot of different kinds of software every single day. IMO, jAlbum is among the very best in terms of value, support, ease of use, and being able to do what I need quickly and without frustration.

I've used album for almost 20 years, just doing simple stuff, usually with the same skin, sometimes adding comments for each or most pictures which can make the album into a story. It's easy to use and publish each album, it works equally well with Linux or Windows. I do wonder... for someday when I want to stop paying for the storage+server and the HTML/whatever that is published... wonder if I can export each album back to my own systems. I would not expect that, but it does sound like it would be easy (but not beneficial to the jalbum team!) to implement. For all I know, such an export/copy already exists. I upgraded my storage amount once and expect that will hold me for many years to come...thanks! Meanwhile google photos keeps trying to improve and compete, but I don't expect the same thing from google.

I started to use jAlbum a year ago for something slightly different from an Image Gallery: cataloging and compiling information about pieces of hardware in a collection. It takes a while to get behind the features and possibilities, but after that time it is almost 'addictive' to use, optimizing layouts and contend is fast because you can test-drive without uploading. Managing a large amount of album projects is easy with the grouping feature. There are some idiosyncrasies due to differences between how jAlbum treats files/folders compared to windows, but one can always ask support and an answer comes back in short time. The option to write 'external tools' is very powerful and the folks at jAlbum helped me with importing device specific information from IPTC tags. If you have access to someone with programming skills, possibilities are endless...
It is easy to get started and make a great web site and easy to get addicted to improve on it based on jAlbum's wide selection of features.