The following Joomla extensions for photos and images are some of the best in our opinion.
Plugins
Image gallery plugins are amazing because you can easily embed nice galleries in your articles all nicely thumbnailed with lightbox zoom effects. We like Easy Image Gallery in particular because it really saves time when it comes to gallery implementation in your articles. We also like the FBoxBot plugin because it too is pretty automated and gives you extra control.
Simple Image Gallery
This is fast to implement because you simply point your image folder in the plugin code parameter within your articles. For example, in your articles you would type:
{gallery}keynote_event{/gallery}
where "keynote_event" would be the name of a folder under /images/stories. The "keynote_event" folder would contain all your full-scale images, that's it. The plugin would create thumbnails in your article and clicking on a thumbnail would trigger a lightbox popup with the full-scale image.
The only glitch about this plugin is it conflicts with JQuery code. We had a JQuery menu and Simple Image Gallery plugin in our article and the JQuery menu refused to work. From what we could gather we understood that this was a Javascript conflict resulting from Jquery and Mootools. This is where FxBox/Bot came to the rescue.
FxBoxBot
FxBoxBot plugin didn't have any conflict with JQuery and worked seamlessly. FxBoxBot plugin requires a little bit more work than Simple Image Gallery. After installing and enabling the module, what you do is simply insert the images full-scale in your article page. Then you just resize them so that they appear as thumbnails. That's it. FxBoxBot plugin automatically creates lighbox zooms for each scaled down thumbnail in your article.
Components
Phoca Gallery
The latest version of the Phoca Gallery is a very comprehensive image component. Phoca Gallery is more than a component and has corresponding modules, plugins, language components and more. However as it is very comprehensive, it takes more time to setup your system than the plugins discussed above. As a component we think Phoca Gallery is the best non-commercial image extension for Joomla.
Modules
RokSlideshow
This is a nice little module where you simply point to the folder where your images are stored. The module then simply creates an animated slideshow of the images available in that folder.
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