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Tumblr is a fantastically simple and fun blogging platform – exploring the different Tumblogs is a great deal of fun and you can easily lose hours there.

However, since Tumblr makes is so easy for anyone to add and reblog content, most the blogs are chock full of stuff (like that’s a bad thing, right?) and pretty hard to fully explore. In particular, look at the photoblogs – there are Tumblr users out there that easily posts 30 – 50 photos on a daily basis, and your typical photoblog enthusiast can easily racks up thousands of posts. With Tumblr’s default navigation, you’ll be forever just skimming the top of the iceberg, since only the most recent posts are always comes first.

Here’s where the idea of a Tumblr gallerizer will come in handy. These are typically sites built by Tumblr users, free to use for all. All you need to do it give it a Tumblr ID, and the site will crawl that Tumblog for photos, come back and organize it in a neat and often creative gallery. This way, you’ll get an at-a-glance view of all the photos and pictures, and won’t have to worry about potentially missing anything great!

Here are the 5 great Tumblr Gallerizers I’ve come across:

Tumblr Mosaic Viewer

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This one is my favorite – it takes the photos and pictures from the Tumblog and assembles them into an impressive mosaic layout. It claims to be able to show up to 10,000 images on a single page (I haven’t been able to verify this yet). Clicking on each image will bring up the larger version for your viewing pleasure, as well as give you access to the image source, permalink page and the reblog option. A very creative and attractive Tumblr gallery maker!

Tumb.la

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Tumb.la is a fast, clean Tumblr gallery maker. It loads about 50 images at a time and lays them out in the form of small, clean thumbnails. Clicking on a photo will bring up a larger version of it, lets you navigate to the previous and next photo, and also brings up features like play photos in a slideshow, permalink and reblog.

One thing I enjoy about Tumb.la is that all the thumbnails load on the same page – no pages to sift and navigate through, although it will still only load additional 50 thumbnails at a time. Another very cool feature is the ability to move and open up more than one photo, creating sort of a stacked polaroids effect that’s pretty fun to play with.

Tumblr Gallery

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The Tumblr Gallery is a no-frills gallery maker, with a fairly simple, straight-forward interface. The gallery is divided up into pages for navigation, and when you click the photo for the expanded view, there are also simple navigation options and a link to the permalink page of the post (unfortunately there is no reblog function here). A nice added bonus is the ability to let you enter in how large you want the thumbnails and the expanded image view to be, and the page you’d like the gallery to start on.

TumView

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Another very powerful gallery maker – this one is somewhat like the Filmstrip view you have in Windows XP, or CoverFlow on your Mac or iPhone. You have your thumbnail galleries on the left side, and clicking each thumbnail will bring up a large version of the picture on the right. What’s interesting is it keeps all the previously viewed image open, so you have a neat history view of the image you’ve checked out. Clicking on each large image will take you to the respective permalink page.

Tumblr Cascade

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This is a more creative and artistic application than a true gallerizer. Think the Tumblr Wire, except for it’s for a particular Tumblog. The Tumblr Cascade display posts in tiled form, and automatically scrolls gently through each post in reverse chronological order. I can image this sort of thing will be pretty cool to have on display on a TV or a spare monitor, 24 x 7, like a personal Tumblr Wire.

Bonus: Tumblr Archive

So this one is by Tumblr – every Tumblog comes with an archive gallery. Most of the Tumblr theme should offer a link to it – if not, just add /archive to the end of your Tumblog URL (for example, http://laboomeria.tumblr.com/archive).
All the posts are organized by month and by year. Clicking on a single month will bring up all the posts for that month. All in all it’s a serviceable gallery maker – however, one thing that really irks me is the image captions that shows up on each respective thumbnails. The thumbnails themselves are already small enough, and the captions easily covers up half of that, making it difficult to tell what the image is. For me this is a dealbreaker, so I don’t use this very much and wouldn’t really recommend it as a gallery – but it’s capable and useful for what it is.

So here they are, 5 Awesome Tumblr Gallery Makers at your disposal. Any questions, comments, tips or suggestions are welcome!

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