zerolight » Gallery G2

I’ve Moved to flickr

zerolight — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 13:10:43 +0000

I’ve finally caved in and migrated my photo gallery to flickr. In the past year I’ve had a few problems with Menalto Gallery 2 which has resulted in a need to rebuild the database – an easy enough task, but one that rewrites the links to each image in the gallery, resulting in dead links all over my blog. I’m told by friends that have been using flickr for ages that it’s very good, so I’m giving it a go. As a result, my work in progress Gallery Photostream module is now dead and buried – replaced my by nifty new flickr photostream module which you see above. I say my module, but it’s actually a modified version of flickr4j which now has a funky background, smaller thumbnails, slimbox integration, and an arrow linking to my flickr photo sets.

Whilst on the topic of flickr, there’s a cool little php app which runs from the h4ppier photos site. What’s cool about it is that you can use it to set the upload date of your flickr photos to the actual date the photo was taken, so that they show up in order on your flickr photostream. Some folk think this isn’t ideal because people want to see your latest uploads, as in the last batch you uploaded. For the most part, I agree – however there are occasions where there are advantages to this process.

For example, I’ve recently migrated several hundred photos from Menalto Gallery to flickr and want to maintain the order that they were uploaded to the previous Gallery installation, thus maintaining continuity for the few folk who actually follow my blog and photo galleries. Of course in the future, the newest items in my photostream will be my latest uploads. I’ve seen lengthy posts asking how to do this on the flickr forum, and it turns out it was quite easy with h4ppier photos.

edit: My modified version of the flickr4j module for displaying a flickr photostream is now completely self contained. I’m very pleased with it and am learning more and more about php and css as I go. Clicking on the flickr logo will take you to my flickr sets, clicking on the arrow to the right of the stream goes to my photostream, and clicking on an individual picture opens that up in slimbox, as part of a set of related images. Anyone wanting a copy let me know and I’ll put together an install package.

Photo’s Added

zerolight — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 15:26:25 +0000

At long last an update. I’ve not posted in what seems like ages. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Eid Mubarak to all.

Photostream

zerolight — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:16:21 +0000

Those with a keen eye may have noticed the addition of a Gallery G2 Photostream module to my site. It’s clearly inspired by the flickr photo toolbar in Flock. If there’s interest, I’ll make it available to download. Right now it’s a hack of my existing Gallery module with plenty of hardcoding to get the layout just right. It’d take some tweaks to make it work with other sites in its current form.

First new Gallery

zerolight — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 02:51:01 +0000

I’ve posted the first new photo gallery after throwing out those 2000 photo’s the other day. It’s a collection of a little over 100 picutres of my son Ali.

Upgraded Gallery to 2.1.1

zerolight — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 08:16:20 +0000

I upgraded my Gallery installion to v2.1.1 yesterday. I’m not sure if it was worth the effort. Apparently this latest release has many new features and performance enhancements. I’ve not really noticed any difference. The upgrade itself was a breeze, but it unfortunately broke the Gallery 2 Bridge . This also required an upgrade, and was a little problematic. I got there in the end. Finally, a significant rewrite of my quad image module was required.

Gallery 2 Quad Image Module for Joomla updated

zerolight — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 07:02:40 +0000

I’ve just released an update of my random quad image Joomla Module for Gallery G2. For whatever reason, the code within both Gallery and the Gallery 2 Bridge changed significantly when Gallery went to version 2.1 which meant that my previous Quad Image module no longer worked. The new version is available to download here. Note that this version will not work with Gallery G2 lower than v2.1

iPhoto to Gallery G2

zerolight — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:45:35 +0000

I’ve never really understood “community” photo sites like flickr, and have long since deserted pbase (which I assume inspired flickr) in favour of Gallery G2. I’ve no interest in the community side of things, my photo’s being primarily for friends and family. As such, the only way you can view my photos is by my site. You have to want to view them, rather than by being a virtual voyeur / stalker on the flickr site. I much prefer to host my own photos, making use of the mammoth storage space that ace-host provide.

Offline I use iPhoto to organise my photos. This is Apples photo management equivalent to iTunes and comes complete with albums (which behave like playlists – both dynamic and static), image tagging, and so on. Basically if it’s in iTunes, there’s an equivalent in iPhoto. The only thing that’s been lacking has been a way to link my offline photo gallery to my online gallery.

Now there’s iPhoto to Gallery. The voyeurs amongst you will be happy to know there’s an equivalent for flickr. This little plugin doesn’t track which photo’s in your offline gallery are in which online gallery (there’s a nice feature for the future, perhaps?) What it does do is eliminate some of the work normally required in order to upload photos to G2. Simply highlight the photos you require in iPhoto, choose export, and then instead of exporting to your desktop for use in a 3rd party application, you export directly into your online gallery.