If you've ever looked at the .Mac capabilities that Apple has for their customers and wondered how hard it would be to make a photo album that will let you just drop images into a form and automatically put them where they need to go, you just might have gotten lucky. The latest Tricks of the Trade article might be one you'd want to look into.

In their latest, Creating an online photo album using PHP, mysql, XHTML and CSS (yay for short titles), Zend walks you through a nice little script that will take in images, and drop them into an "online gallery" page for you so you can show them off to friends and family. Of course, they provide you with all of the code, and how to get your images into the MySQL database, and even some examples images of how things will look when they're done.

There's a few things that this is missing to be a good replacement for most of the "photo album" pieces out there - things like: using GD to make real thumbnails (scaled down versions are horrible for dialup users), different galleries (for those of us with more than one thing going on in their lives), and a little bit more control of the layout of things. Other than that, it's a nice start...