zerolight

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.

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

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.

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.

That’s how many photos I purged from my libraries (deliberately) over the past few days. Either I’ve taken a lot less photo’s in the past 2 years, or my photography skills have significantly improved, but of the 2000 deletions, 200 were from the past 2 years, with the other 1800 from the previous 3 years. It’s amazing how much crap I kept. Blurry photos, Poor photos, Duplicates, I was just too lazy to throw out the duffers at the time, instead just archiving everything with a do-it-tomorrow attitude. Still, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve thrown away too many. EEK.

Over the course of this process I spent quite a bit of time with both Aperture and Lightroom. I can tell you that Aperture was less painful, and far quicker to use for this type of task. Of the 1500 odd photos left in my library, the majority benefited from straightening and cropping. I probably used some of the other tools in Aperture and Lightroom to enhance about 10% of those photographs. I’ve grown to really like Aperture by the way. Anyway, job done. Well, almost. I still have to work through that 1500+ photos in iPhoto and tag them all to make navigating them easier, then clean up my online gallery.