Pictures

[autographedcat]

Once upon a time, I took a lot of photographs. Whenever I go somewhere with a descent camera, I tend to snap off a lot of pictures, because I enjoy it. And when I get home, I put them on my webpage.

What I've always been really bad about is actually going through and captioning them, and providing thumbnails, and all the other things that really make a photo archive usable by, say, people who aren't me. It was always one of those "things to get around to" that I never got around to.

Well, some time ago, themouseshouse told me about an open source project called Gallery. The entire thing is written in PHP, and makes the entire effort of maintaining a photo archive on the web painless, or so it promised, so I thought I'd try it out.

Wow.

No, let me make this clear...

WOW!

The software was everything I wanted and more. It took a couple of hours to get working, mostly having to do with upgrading PHP and Apache on my server and installing several graphics manipulation packages for the program to do its magic. But once it was working, it was amazing. It automatically generates thumbnail pages, in a grid sized to your choosing. You can manipulate images on the fly, rotating them, resizing them, reordering them, however you like. If you want to remove a shot, just click on the "delete photo" button, confirm your choice, and its gone, and the thumbnails are regenerated to get rid of the gap. I was impressed.

The first batch of photos I set up were the shots I took at the Quinze Filk Festival last October. Those had seen these before will know that there were a large number of completely useless shots mixed in with some that were rather good. Once they'd been imported into Gallery, kitanzi went through all 900 shots and threw away nearly half of them. There's still some that are fuzzy or blurred, but the overall set is quite watchable. (And now needs to be captioned.).

The program managed uploading pictures as well, so it can be used to completely take over the management of this entire set of my webpage. You can even enable it to allow visitors to leave comments on pictures, so they can help with captioning, or just giving feedback on your photography.

I'm very happy. If you want to see the whole archive, go here. Note that large sections of these photos STILL aren't captioned. Its the ongoing project. But the photos are all there.

Now, I just need a new camera. I was lusting after the new 8 megapixel cameras while browsing at Circuit City last night, though the reviews I read on the Sony DSC-F828 lead me to believe it's not quite mature enough to spend that kind of money. I am thinking strongly about the Canon G5, which fits much more easily into my budget. Then I can take a few thousand MORE photos for my website.

bounce Happy ACat!

Comments

[lothie.livejournal.com]

I actually wrote something similar in ASP. Not as fancy, but it was just a quick job. Photo galleries = nice. :)

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'm a SysAdmin, not a programmer, so I have to go find packages to do what I want. :)

Having thumbnails and easy-to-manage collections makes me all kinds of happy. :)

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling that the shots with the "P" prefix are the ones I took... are those all still intact somewhere?

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I still have them all. Some of them are in that Gallery, I'm sure. kitanzi weeded out the duff shots, so she may or may not have tossed some of yours if she thought they were too blurry.

All the photos are still on my hard drive, though, if you want them.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you could burn them onto a CD or something.

[katyhh.livejournal.com]

VERY cool photo gallery indeed :) Happy me, too - makes them so much easier to browse ;-)

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Yup. I'd always meant to find a way to do this, but I never realized that someone had made it so easy for me that there was no reason not to do it.

8MP cameras

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

Rob, I've been told by a at-least-semi-professional photographer that it's not the megapixels: it's the camera, lens, and software. I've seen some absolutely stunning 2MP pictures of his that I couldn't tell about from film.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

From my reading and discussions with better photographers than me, you're nearly right -- it's not JUST the megapixels. It's the combination of all those things.

That's why I'm following the reviews closely and making an informed choice. I highly recommend the site http://www.dpreview.com/ which is not only comprehensive but quite educational.