How to set up a photo gallery

Please note: Photo galleries are a legacy feature, and are no longer under active development. For a fully featured photo gallery, we recommend SmugMug.

You can publish digital photos as an online gallery for your friends and family to view in three steps:

  1. Create a new folder in your Files page.

  2. Upload your photos into that folder.

  3. Create a Fastmail photo gallery website.

Create a new photo album folder in Files

In your Files page, you can create a new folder for your photos or you can use the automatically created album folder.

To create a new photo gallery folder, click the New Folder button.

Add photos to your new folder

Click your new folder to open it. To add files, use the Upload button, or drag and drop files from your computer onto your web browser window.

For more information, see our file upload guide.

Create the photo gallery

Once you have uploaded files to a folder, you can publish your photo gallery by clicking the Websites button located on the Files screen. From there, click the Create Website button at the top of the screen.

create website screen

To publish your photo gallery:

  1. Choose the the address where your website will be published in the URL section. Choose the domain you wish to use from your email addresses and custom domains, and optionally enter a further subdomain section before it, or a path after it. If you are using your own domain, you must host your name servers with Fastmail, not just your MX records.

  2. If you are using a personal domain hosted with Fastmail for your website, you can choose to encrypt your website with Let's Encrypt HTTPS.

  3. Select Publish as Photo gallery.

  4. In the Publish folder section, select the folder that you've uploaded your photos to.

  5. If you would like to keep your website private, enter a password in the Password field. This will deny access to anyone who does not know the password.

  6. Choose a theme and title for your photo gallery.

  7. Click the Save button. Your photos will be published and accessible at the web address you specified.

Photos are shown alphabetically by their title. If a title isn't set, the filename is used as a title. The sort order in the Files page does how the photos are displayed in the photo gallery.

photo gallery preview

Change the style of a photo gallery

If you'd like to alter the appearance of your photo gallery, you can create your own CSS stylesheet.

Name it photogallery.css and place it in the same directory as the photos. It will provide theme overrides to whatever the base theme you selected in the settings.

Add comments to a photo

You can add comments to a photo that will display with each picture. They will also display when you hover over a photo's thumbnail in grid view.

To add or change comments to your photos, open the photo from your Files page and add your comments below the image.

You can include some basic html tags in the comments, for example wrapping your text in <b>tags for bold</b>, and <i>tags to italicise</i>. If you add a URL, such as http://www.fastmail.com, it will automatically be converted into a hyperlink.

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