With hundreds of websites offering free online photo management and sharing services, creating an online photo gallery is no big deal. Such galleries look very basic and are best only for social networking and sharing photos with family and friends. If you want something that looks fancy with transition effects, background music, automatic slideshows, and more, then a Flash photo gallery is a very good option. Creating a Flash photo gallery would take ages if it were to be made in Adobe Flash and you would have to know how to use it. There are numerous applications with which you can create stunning Flash photo galleries without even knowing a bit about Flash CoffeeCup Photo Gallery is one of them.

The application launched with a Theme Browser from which you have to select a theme for your photo gallery. It offers 11 themes to choose from, each for a different mood and occasion. But all of them have a similar layout with a thumbnail filmstrip at the bottom or side of the display area. The only elements that are different are the overlay images. A few sample pictures are already present so that you can get a look and feel of the theme. After you have selected the theme you are prompted to add photos to the gallery. CoffeeCup Photo Gallery supports all major image formats including JPG, BMP, GIF and PNG. You don't have to worry about resizing the images it's handled by the software. You only have to select the image size from the drop down list. The default size is 800x600 pixels and the maximum selectable size is 1440x900 pixels. You will then be directed to the 'Manage Photos and Albums' dialog box where the main action lies.

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Here you can add or remove photos from the album, add more albums to the gallery, change the sequence of the images, add captions, and so on. The right side of the dialog box has a panel with two tabs-'Album settings' and 'Advanced'. These provide options to customize the font, appearance and the background music. A few music loops in MP3 format are already included in the package, but you can select a song of your choice. You can preview your photo gallery at any point of time by clicking the 'Preview' button.

The final step is customizing the various elements of the gallery. Background image, background size and color, thumbnail size, transition effects, slide duration and border color are some of the elements that can be customized. When you're done, you can either publish the gallery to a website or save it on your hard drive. The HTML code for displaying the photo gallery on a webpage is displayed when you're about to publish or save the gallery.

CoffeeCup Photo Gallery has a very intuitive user interface which won't require even a first-timer to refer to the Help file. It hardly takes a few minutes to create a simple Flash photo gallery. However, the software lacks many features because of which we feel that it's a bit overpriced. For example, there are a very limited number of themes to choose from. If you're a beginner, you are restricted to only 11 built-in themes and to top that, there aren't any layouts to choose from. Apart from the background images and overlays, all themes have the same look and feel. Also the choice of transition effects is very limited (only five) and you cannot customize the transition of individual photos. When you select a transition, it's applied to the entire gallery. We hope CoffeeCUp addresses these issues in the next version.