On the prowl with my cute little Brownie camera, no one had an inkling that images would some day be captured with ones and zeros instead of film. 24 shots to a roll seemed like a lot at the time, but now I’ve got a memory card capacity of 800 pictures at 12 megapixels per shot.
Digital photos are exploding like mammals in the Cenozoic era. Soon they will take over. Fortunately we have a technical solution for corraling them into order and utility, these billions of images now crowdsourced from all corners of the planet. Among other things, this is what the Internet is for.
With a growing variety of great photo sites like Flickr, Picassa, etcetera, surely we don’t need another personal hacked-together photoblog trying to "innovate." But that’s exactly what I propose to do here. It may fall flat on its face, but here’s the beauty: I don’t care. This is simply a way for me to organize my burgeoning photo collection and share it with anyone who might be interested for whatever reason.
So, the goals of this site are as follows:
- Catalog my thousands of freakin’ photos
- Display them in various alternative ways
- Have fun looking at them
- Along the way, discover some useful code and best practices for cataloging and displaying photos
- Document everything so as to retain and share what I learn
- Stick with web standards for maximum possible extent of accessibility
- Have fun with webotography
As we roll out new sections, galleries, and so-called features, I hope you will offer comments: what works, what’s annoying, and any ideas or suggestions about different ways of organizing and displaying images and other content. If this site becomes actually useful that’ll be due to efforts beyond what I bring to it.
Categories: about
This is barely functional and has only a few photos (as of 4/12/2009) but:
http://webotography.com/multibox/
This is based on the Multibox Mootools script and helpful css guidance from TJKDesign. Multibox is a nice lightbox-like script with many extra features, including the ability to put any html inside the overlay box. It took me a while to find a solution for even display of thumbnail images with different proportions, so thanks to TJK for that.
Categories: galleries
Just now did a bit of work on the multibox gallery. This site is built in ExpressionEngine, the CMS I’ve been using almost exclusively for the past two years. EE is a great CMS with lots of native functionality. Unfortunately, the EE version 1.6 method of uploading files (like images for a gallery) truly sucks. There is a marvelous EE extension written by Mark Huot called File. Mark Huot offers bunches of great EE extensions for free, but to be honest his documentation doesn’t work very well for me. Helpfully, bkuberek has written on the EE support forum a very helpful guide to using the File extension.
One of the features of the File extension is auto-creation of thumbnails upon uploading an image. You can set thumbnail widths, irrespective of height, by setting the Maximum Image Width property in the EE File Upload Preferences, like this: 
Normally this setting would prevent uploading of any image wider than 100px, but with the File extension enabled, it tells the system to make the thumbnail 100px wide, and leaves the original full-size image unaffected. To get a 100px wide thumbnail, you also must set the Resize Images setting to Anchor Width. So your thumbnails will be 100px wide, and however tall they need to be based on the original image dimensions. So you could have a nice row of thumbnails 100px wide but all kinds of crazy sizes tall. That doesn’t look so good in, let’s say, a grid of thumbnails like I have in the Multibox Gallery.
But I just figured out a solution. An undocumented feature of the Huot File extension is, you can set the image width to 100px AND the image height to (in this case) 75px, and then set Resize Images to Crop:
All your thumbnails will automatically be cropped to 100px x 75px, but the original image will be unaffected. I can arrange my thumbnails in a nice even grid, like we now see in the Multibox Gallery.
Now I need to get busy and add some more photos…
Categories: ExpressionEngine • How to
So much for being clever. I decided I didn’t like the layout of thumbnails with different verticle and horizontal dimensions, so reverted to using only 100x75px thumbnail images. This lines up more nicely to my eye, but has the significant disadvantage of not allowing portrait-sized images. And cropping works only sometimes, because you can’t control which part of the image is cropped, so sometimes you end up with a thumbnail showing only sky or something.
So back to the drawing board on the thumbnail grid.
Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded some new images, including a few from my 2006 trip to Alaska. I also finished the functionality of the Categories menu including nested categories, visible now in the Multibox Gallery.