Here’s another reason to use a client-side Web gallery generator that you don’t hear about much: upload time.

Because Shozam optimizes images within the program (making them Web friendly), and the entire gallery is uploaded at once, I knew uploading a Shozam gallery was a lot faster than uploading photos to an online service. But I wanted to find out exactly how much faster, so I did a test.

I created a gallery with 547 images, which took me 30 minutes (10 minutes to import images into the gallery and 20 minutes to generate the gallery).

A quick aside: For the record, there are no inherent limitations on how many images you can import into Shozam. We’ve received a couple of emails from people saying they received an error message that “Too many files were selected. Please select fewer files.” This is a Windows Operating System limitation, which generates the error message if you select more than 200 files. To bring more pictures into your Shozam albums, just make sure you bring them in batches of no more than 200 each.

Back to my test gallery. The 547 source images in this gallery were originally generated by a 7.2 Mega Pixel camera (Casio Exilim EX-2750) totaling 2 GB. Shozam took these images and created an optimized gallery of 60 MB – a 40x reduction in size. It took an hour to upload the Shozam gallery using Qwest DSL that we have in our corporate offices. Uploading the original images to the same Web host would have taken 40 times longer, or almost two days and nights of continuous uploading! And that is assuming the connection remains active without any glitches during the upload process.

The actual gallery I created, with stats, is on the Examples page of our Web site:
http://www.shozam.com/examples/index.htm

The net result: Shozam galleries upload 40 times faster. To me, this is a significant time savings. Let me know some of the other advantages you see using a Web gallery generator vs. a photo sharing service.