jAlbum

jAlbum is photo gallery software for photographers who publish their own sites. Drag images and videos in, pick a skin, build the gallery, upload to your domain via the built-in FTP — or host on jalbum.net. The software runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, integrates with Lightroom Classic through a plugin that maps Lightroom collections to jAlbum galleries, and reads Adobe XMP metadata so captions, ratings, and keywords carry across the workflow.

The detail worth naming is the model. Most photo gallery tools are cloud-first — your photos live on someone else's servers, the layout follows their template, and migration off the platform is rarely simple. jAlbum is desktop-first: the program runs on your machine, the gallery is files on your disk, FTP pushes them wherever you host. If the company stopped existing tomorrow, the galleries already published would keep working. That's been the editorial position since 2002, and it's why the software still has a community after 23 years.