Okay, I've finally decided to take the jump into web development. Now, to put things into perspective when I say "web development" I'm pretty happy when I manage to create a web page that says "Hello world", so please be patient with me.

What has sparked my interest in this is wanting to make a web site gallery of digital pictures and such. I thought that would be an interesting project to tackle and learn something new with. What I'd like to try to accomplish is a simple web page that automatically pupulates itself with images it finds in a given folder. So, I put various graphic files into a folder (and that is all that it has in it) and when the page loads it'll dynamically create a gallery of the images.

What kind of options do I have to do this sort of thing?

Thanks
Mike

http://ifoto.ireans.com/

this is the best that i could find. im currently using it on a website im making, its very easy and looks good.

Looks promising. How do I make it work? (I'm having trouble getting a handle on PHP.)

I have a basic Index.htm file (it says "Hello world" right now). I'd put a link called something like "Picture Gallery", but what would I link it to? Index.php? How do you call a PHP script/page from a basic HTML file? I've been hunting around, but I keep finding references to .htaccess modifications on Linux web servers.

you just link it to index.php
are you doing this on your own comp, apache, a server? you cant just run it from your comp unless you have a server program such as apache installed.

I'm working on my desktop. so that's going to be a problem.

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
this is what i use to turn my computer into a "server"

This works pretty well:
http://celerondude.com/php-simple-gallery

It's exactly what you want, too!

Second vote for CeleronDude! It's very simple to use, and you just dump pictures in the directory. The script does the rest.