Sharing your photos with the world can be a tricky business. If you don’t like sharing them via third-party services, then a tool like PhotoPageGen could be a lifesaver. It’s designed to create online photo albums through generating HTML code that you can either upload to your web host via the program's Publish function, or simply share by other means.

Start by organising the photos you want to share into a single folder (photos can be stored inside sub-folders to created nested albums too). This is where PhotoPageGen will store its files locally, allowing you to distribute them yourself instead of uploading via the program’s own Publish button.

Next, launch PhotoPageGen to access its rather dated-looking user interface: drag your folder into the window and wait for the program to add the photos and generate thumbnails. Once done, you can start to configure your web pages.

This involves adding a page title, subtitle and description. Click Settings to add copyright information in the form of a watermark, then choose your page background design from 13 templates, choosing a colour scheme and setting the design of your photo thumbnails.

You can also tick GPS/Map, which will attempt to extract any location data from your photos and provide people with a clickable link to the location of the shot. Tick ‘Captions’ to caption each individual photo, and ‘Add an Overlay’ to watermark the images for copyright reasons.

All changes can be previewed manually (although the preview window will often pop up after you select specific options, which can be annoying) and there are all the controls you need to craft a page to your personal taste. Once done, click Publish to upload it to your web host via FTP.

The program is let down by a lack of documentation, which means a lot of trial and error is involved with newer features, but it’s worth noting you can close and reopen it without losing any of your hard work. You can also work on multiple albums at the same time – simply drag another folder into the program window to add it.

What’s new in version 7.3? 

Enhanced: GUI. Mostly via tooltips/help for various controls, and reorganizing things, and adding themes (see below).
Enhanced webpage: Mostly via adding tooltips to hearts, added tooltip to login name area, making things line up better,
Added: Themes. Significant cleanup of user interface. Aggregated most settings under a theme mechanism. Now much simpler. Just pick a theme. Settings still adjustable.
Enhanced: Gems. Now support multiple gems (clunky before), and with username son them. Click any heart with ctrl, alt, or ctrl-shift to add a gem. Fixed a few bugs with gems as well.