I created the** Silverlight PhotoBrowser** to make it really easy to show your photo's in a gallery on the web.
All you have to do is install this PhotoBrowser ASP.Net solution on your server, and upload your images to the "images" directory. The application will take care of the rest.

It will generate a list of thumbnail images, and the option to select the image to view it full screen.

This is how it's done:

  1. You - Open the Silverlight PhotoBrowser
  2. PhotoBrowser - Requests RSS feed with Photo's from ImageRSS.ashx
  3. ImageRSS.ashx - Gives an RSS feed of all image file names in the image directory
  4. PhotoBrowser - Calls the thumbnail maker to give thumbnails of the images
  5. CreateThumbnail.ashx - Gives Thumbnail images back to Silverlight PhotoBrowser
  6. PhotoBrowser - Shows thumbnail images

When you click on an image, the Photo Browser will load the full image, located in the image directory.

Why is it done this way?
Silverlight runs client side. So Silverlight does not have permission to find out what images there are in your image directory. The ImageRSS runs server side and has permission to do that.

Why a thumbnail creator?
Loading all the full images in Silverlight takes a lot of bandwith and memory, which makes things very slow. Loading only small thumbnail images is a lot faster.

To view this sample, http://www.michielpost.nl/PhotoBrowser/PhotoBrowserTestPage.aspx

Download the sourcecode: http://www.michielpost.nl/PhotoBrowser/PhotoBrowserWebSource.zip

NOTE: Make sure to open PhotoBrowserTestPage.aspx via the build in visual studio webserver.

The basic layout of this application came from Will Allan's Blog: http://willys-web.blogspot.com/2008/03/creating-silverlight-image-viewer.html