How does Dad easily show his paintings online?

I've been quite pleased with Flickr (which I've been using recently for photos) - it does have flash for creating sets and looking at slide shows, but it doesn't seem to use flash for basic display. I don't think that there is any storage limit - instead there is a monthly upload minute, but I would confirm this. (I've just started using it). A pay account has more than a free account (which is what I'm using). What I do like is that they have a tools which lets you publish groups of images to flickr as a batch; the WinXP one piggy backs on MSN's publish to the web wizard. It's much easier than loading each image individually. This doesn't let you customise your webpage -- but I think you can store on Flickr and link to it from somewhere else.

DreamHost gives you the http://gallery.menalto.com/ as a one-click install that, once it's set up, is very very easy to roll with. It came up a very close second to my slightly http://www.whiskeyandfailure.com that I've chosen for my photoblog. If you use my promo code BKEVIN01, you get a year's robust hosting for less than $60. I've got over 1,000 visitors a day on my main http://beaucoupkevin.com, post lots of MP3s and images and have yet to get anywhere close to their limits.

Well, I think he wants it pretty basic. Just like the painting's title, an image of the painting, maybe a description, and then a few internal links. What I've seen of Flickr is that it's a bit busier with about two-dozen links (to other users, MyYahoo and such) that the people coming to see his paintings might get sidetracked by. Flickr seems great for community-building and sharing and searching through photos, but not quite what he's looking for. I'm thinking more like if http://www.papirhandelen.no/Bilder/Produkter/0_1/fargeringer.jpg made a web site—something that is simple and, for the uninitiated user, almost impossible to click on the wrong thing.

The first page I get when I go to Flickr is a bit complicated, but http://www.flickr.com/photos/33874620@N00/ (self link, obviously) page is pretty simple - showing no one else's photos. The rest of the links are quite discreet at the bottom, somewhat Google like.

Your father might give the brand-new site http://www.tabblo.com/ a try. It lets you upload photos, with a focus on gallery-like pages. http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/1399/.

Consider also FastMail's http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=554.

You may be asking for a lot for free (especially the no advertising thing, since a site providing a service has to support itself somehow).. If you can bend on the no advertising thing, or are willing to pay a small fee, http://www.deviantart.com was made exactly for this sort of thing.

If he's willing to pay : http://projekt30.com/ offers hosting specifically for artists. It's easy to set up, easy to navigate, and very elegant. I'm a photographer/collage artist and I have a page hosted with them and it's been really good. I don't know if your dad is looking to plug his art at all, but people have been known to contact me through my website and it's been good networking. (No sales as of yet, but you can't have everything!) For an example of how the site works, my page can be found http://nervousmotion.30art.com/.

I'd recommend using http://www.majordojo.com/projects/PhotoGallery/ with Movable Type on http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-1862119-10406411 which has 5GB of disk space for 8 bucks a month on the web hosting starter plan. PhotoGallery is free and makes http://www.majordojo.com/photos/harper-ford-reese/, and Movable Type has a built-in junk filter for comments. I just wrote about a great http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2006/05/kathleen_connal.html, which I like almost as much as the one by our own http://tenyearsofmylife.com/. Even simpler is http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/2005/12/photo_albums_ar.html on http://www.typepad.com/, which are available on the basic plan that's $4.95 a month. I work for the company that makes both MT and TypePad, but I also use all of the stuff above for my own photos when I want to publish albums.