I Finally Have A Picture Gallery!
It only took 7 months, but I finally got around to getting a picture gallery working on my website. If you remember my old website, I created a gallery from scratch that could be embedded into any webpage. You would upload your pictures to a folder on your webserver, then in your website code, you would embed a gallery, telling the software where to find your pictures.
When the website is accessed, it scans the folder and automatically creates all the thumbnail and preview images needed for the gallery using Imagemagick. One of the main issues I had with this implementation is that it was table based (as was a lot of web layouts back in the day). This meant you needed to be aware of the total size of the website that you were embedding the gallery in.
For my new implementation, I took a different approach. I decided not to reinvent the wheel. There is a service out there called flickr (unless you have been living under a rock, you already know what flickr is) which allows you to upload photos to an online gallery. The nice thing about flickr is that they offer an extensive api which can be used to get information about pictures that have been uploaded. I decided to leverage this service, and its ability to provide me with information about my gallery and used it to create a gallery for my personal website. I let flickr do what it does best; manage my photos and then I created my software to display it to the world the way I want it.
This time around, I used <div /> tags and CSS to develop the layout for the gallery which allows it to be embedded in all sorts of locations, and it will adapt to its container. It is definitely a lot slicker of a setup than my last gallery.
My gallery is in the early stages right now, but as soon as it is done I will release my source code. Right now it just displays the photos, but using flickr’s api, I can get neat information such as EXIF data which might be interesting to have on my gallery.
January 24th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Awesome start. Good job.
Definitely a good use of Flickr… one of the main reasons why I haven’t pushed photos to Flickr is because their viewing interface isn’t great. In fact I’ll go as far as saying that it sucks. The transition times for the image resizing is a little slow so far, but I’m a fan of speed in viewing.
Definitely some promise here though. I’ve been too busy with ‘work’ in order to venture into doing something like this myself.