So my girlfriend (now fiancée) and I recently got back from two weeks in Hawaii. I took some 340-odd digital photos. Of course, when we got home, everybody was clamoring to see our pictures right now. I ended up doing impromptu displays on my laptop, but that can be about as exciting as the traditional unending slide projector show of doom.

I know some people like to use online services to make their photos widely available, but I've always found the quality of those sites to suck, at best.

Another possibility are the various and sundry PHP photo managers or automatic HTML generation tools built into iPhoto, ACDSee, or whatnot. You get somewhat better control and cataloging, but the resulting web experience still sucks.

For the past few years, I've been choosing my favorites, indivually Photoshopping them, and placing them in hand-tuned HTML, but this is just insanely labor intensive. It took me almost two days of work to get my Hawaiian vacation page together, despite having all manner of shell scripts to do the easy but repetitive parts, like generating HTML wrappers for images, and making the thumbnails.

Anyone have any better answers? (Aside from perhaps going back to Hawaii and having several of those umbrella drinks in coconuts?) I'm intrigued by Picasa, but it doesn't support any "raw" image formats yet, which means my pipeline still needs to include flakey Canon software. Although I understand that non-Canon RAW converters do exist, they just dump the interpolated image. You then need to color-correct and tweak every single image, rather than just the ones that the raw converter can't get right on its own.