Images are important. Orthodox Christians know that better than any other Christian community, which is why we struggle to keep our churches adorned appropriately. Many of our icons, of course, depict scenes from the life of the Church. Great events in the Christian past are rendered in gold leaf and hung for all to see and venerate. We understand how important it is to visually chronicle our past as a community, and to honor that past.

But a curious thing happens to most Orthodox Parishes when it comes to their Websites. Most are almost entirely devoid of images of parish life. On the Web, we chronicle very little of what the current Church Militant is doing.

The primary reason for this is that under a static HTML framework, which most parishes have, putting pictures onto a Website is just plain drudgery.

First you build a page for the thumbnails. You put the thumbnails on the page in cells of a table. Then you put each picture in full size on a different HTML page. Then you link all the small pics to the big pictures. Then you add a link to the gallery page on your menu.

Simple, but time consuming. Which is why no volunteer Webmaster or time-crunched priest is going to spend the time necessary to put a lot of pictures on the parish Website. For the most part, a parish site will feature a few shots of the church, some of the clergy, parish council, and maybe a few galleries of big events like blessing a new building or a big festival.

That is about it. Most people recognize this is a problem. I remember an article in the OCA's magazine a few years ago when the father writing on Evangelism and the Internet remarked:

"People want to see pictures of people, and instead we show them buildings."

Which is true. People want to know that Orthodox Christians are people just like them. They want to get a sense of our community life. What do we do? How do we worship? How do we have fun together? What do our youth activities look like?

But we don't show them that. Instead, we show them a very static view of only a narrow slice of our church life. I wanted, as a parish Webmaster, to break out of that trap. I wanted to get to a place, technically, where I could display quickly and easily dozens, or even hundreds, of pictures for the world to see. Not only for the sake of evangelism, but also to help chronicle the life of our community for the members of our community.

That is why after launching the phpBB bulletin board (as covered in a previous blog) in mid-2006, the next task I tackled for my parish was to launch a photo gallery site. As with the bulletin board, I had high hopes of making the Photo Gallery site a pan-Deanery and even Pan-Orthodox endeavor. Most parishes don't have a parish Webmaster who builds Websites professionally, so I was really hoping to offer easy creation of photo galleries as a free service to help other parishes in Central Floria.

As with the bulletin board, I looked at stand-alone applications that were Open Source (in other words - free). I wanted a robust, easy to manage photo gallery application that did not require any kind of external framework to function. I also wanted one that could easily bridge to the bulletin board.

What's a bridge? It's a link between two independent applications that lets them share a common user base. By bridging the photo gallery and the phpBB, I would be able to manage only one set of users. Administrators on the bulletin board would be admins automatically on the photo gallery.

In addition to the ability to stand-alone and to bridge to phpBB, I had the following requirements set:

1. Automatic creation of thumbnails and medium-sized images. I wanted to upload a single image (800 x 600 usually) and I wanted the software to automatically size other views for browse pages.
2. Slideshows
3. Greeting cards
4. Comments
5. Easy gallery creation for regular users. I wanted non-admins who had pictures of an Orthodox event to be able to easily create galleries and upload the pictures.
6. Batch uploading for admins. I wanted to be able to upload using FTP large numbers of pictures at once, assign them to a photo album, and then have the software take care of the rest of the load process.
7. Download of favorites into a zip file. Users can pick photos they like, and bundle them easily into a zip file and download them.

Armed with my requirements set, I went looking for the correct package. After looking at several, I finally settled on Coppermine Photo Gallery . Coppermine is an Open Source application, so I downloaded the package, unzipped it locally, and then uploaded the files to a sub-directory on my server.

I then ran the browser-based install, and selected my existing data-base as the target installation environment. Two different applications can reside in the same data-base, so adding in the photo gallery component did not increase the costs to my parish.

Off to the Races

After installing the software, I began building albums and uploading pictures. As an admin, I can upload 100 or so pictures to a photo gallery and have three views automatically built (thumbnail, medium-size for browsing, and large view) in under 5 minutes.

(You can view the photo gallery site by clicking here .)

Within a single year, we have ended up with 824 pictures of all kinds of events. Home gatherings, children lighting the nativity candles, visits from our bishop, church worship, youth activities, trips by parishioners to Orthodox countries, and even pictures of events from other parishes. People take pictures, and they go on the Net. Just like that.

The most popular picture has been viewed 151 times. Not bad, when you consider that St. Stephen has around 100 adults total, including the elderly who don't surf the Net much. Our own people are viewing the gallery, but in addition to them I can tell by the numbers that non-parishioners are taking in the sites as well.

Lessons Learned

Like the bulletin board, my experience with the photo gallery software has been mixed.

First of all, the application has made it so that (as a Webmaster) I can show hundreds of pictures of our parish life for a fraction of the effort. That is a great thing. If you browse the galleries, you will see that we have been very well documenting our parish life since the installation of the software.

This fact, by itself, is more than worth the effort for parishes to invest the time and effort necessary to deploy this kind of application!

On the downside, the gallery has remained a Webmaster only zone. Despite the fact that any registered member can build a gallery and upload photos as easily as using Snapfish or Yahoo photos, not a single member of my parish has ever even tried.

Why? I'm not sure really. I have a small parish, of course, so we are not talking about a large pool of people. But I have a hunch that the biggest issue is just plain fear. I get picture CDs from people all the time who would like me to upload photos for them, but they just plain balk at the idea of doing it themselves.

Fortunately, the gallery has so automated the process of creating photo galleries that we don't run into any bottlenecks. I can do the work fast enough that it isn't worth the hassle for me to try and get the parish to upload photos.

Also on the downside has been, as with the bulletin board, the lack of interest from all across Central Florida in using the application. Even though I would gladly assist Webmasters in setting up their own galleries and linking directly to them from their Websites, there haven't been any takers for this as a service.

I'm not sure what stymies co-operation among Orthodox, but it is a very real detriment to the Faith. Protestants co-operate across denominational lines all the time. We are united by one Faith, but even inside the same jurisdiction, we can't seem to work together as effectively as we need to.

The interactive features of the gallery have also not been used extensively. I send greeting cards all the time using the photos, but I seem to be in the minority with that. Comments and even a rating system are available, but those haven't been used either, really.

The only other comment on the negative side would be the bridge process itself. By having phpBB and Coppermine linked via a bridge, I now find myself having to upgrade both applications simultaneously or not at all. We are on old releases now of both, but I can't do one without the other. Finding time for both upgrades has been a challenge!

Final Thoughts

Photo gallery software is the only way to go if you want to display a lot of pictures with minimal effort. As a Webmaster, I can't stress this enough. It has been my experience that I didn't get a lot of buy-in from my own community for using it as a true Web 2.0 platform. However, my community is small and in a non-Orthodox area, so other communities and other areas will have different experiences.

The bottom line is that parishioners want to see pictures of themselves. Potential converts want to see what they are getting into before they show up. Social networking sites like OrthodoXCircle are great for sharing photos between Orthodox Christians. Sites like Yahoo photos are great for sharing photos among friends and family. But a well-run parish site needs to feature a robust selection of photos that are available to the general public and which can be found on Google and other search engines.

Next blog - taking the plunge into a Content Management System.