You can publish digital photos and videos in your Fastmail account as an online gallery for your friends and family to view.
Create your photo gallery folder
You can create an album and add images/videos by following these steps:
- Go to your Files screen and click the New folder button.
- Click the folder, then click the Upload button or drag and drop files from your computer onto your web browser window.
For more information, see our Fastmail file storage help page.
Publish your photo gallery
Once you have uploaded the images into a folder, you can publish your photo gallery by following these steps:
- Go to Files → Websites and click Create website.
- In the URL section, choose the the address where your website will be published. You can choose the domain and optionally enter a further subdomain section before it, or a path after it. (Note: If you are using your own domain, you must host your nameservers with Fastmail for this to work.)
- In the HTTPS section, you can choose to encrypt your website with Let's Encrypt HTTPS if you are using a custom domain hosted with Fastmail.
- In the Publish as section, select Photo gallery.
- In the Publish folder section, select the folder that you've uploaded your photos to.
- 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.
- Click the Save button. Your photos will be published and accessible at the web address you specified.
Visiting your photo gallery
The photo gallery will automatically display in light or dark mode depending on the visitor's system preferences.
Visitors who prefer using keyboard shortcuts can use the left and right arrow keys or the j and k keys to browse the gallery.
Images/videos are sorted alphabetically by title (see Photo titles and comments below). If a title has not been set, the file name will be used as the title.
We offer a number of views for visitors to choose from:
- Grid - Displays all images/videos on a single page. This is the default view that visitors will first see.
- Calendar - Displays all images/videos on a single page, organized by the date they were taken.
- Map - Displays all images/videos in an interactive map based on the location where they were taken. (For more information on location data, please see Exif metadata and location privacy below.)
- Single - Displays one image/video at a time.
- Filmstrip - Displays one image/video at a time, with thumbnails of other images/videos displayed underneath.
- Slideshow - Displays each image/video for 5 seconds, then automatically switches to the next image/video.
EXIF metada and location privacy
Locations in the map view are based on the EXIF metadata embedded in the image/video files. If an image/video file has EXIF metadata, that data would be accessible to anyone who downloads the files.
If you prefer to keep your locations private, we recommend stripping the EXIF metadata from your image/video files before uploading them.
There are multiple EXIF stripping programs available, such as ExifCleaner, Exif Eraser and Exif Remover.
On macOS, you can also strip EXIF data by following these steps:
- Open Finder and locate the file.
- Right-click on the file.
- Go to Quick Actions at the end of the menu, then select Convert Image.
- Uncheck Preserve Metadata.
- Click Convert to JPEG.
Photo titles and comments
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.
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. Save the the file with photogallery.css set as the title and place it in the same directory as the photos, and it will override the base theme.