Just thought I’d share it. It’s a work in progress and is technically not ‘public’ yet (hence the passworded dir) but I figured you guys are relatively trustworthy to be given the credentials.
Username is ‘guest’
password is ‘tomato’
It uses PHP, CSS, Javascript, Ajax (the comments)
The images are large ‘thumbnails’ of the larger images (click the image for the large version)
feel free to make suggestions (particularly if you are a CSS/PHP/Javascript/whatever guru and feel that you’d do something differently or better)
I know I’ve re-invented the wheel and that there are galleries out there that can do this, but letting something else do all the work is not the way to learn. And learning is my goal.
Yeah, there are galleries that do this. But I got so sick of how difficult Flickr makes it for people to see my photos, that I finally got my own web site. And it’s not that expensive.
Your gallery looks great. Loved the pics…I can’t explain why, but they had a slight “Futurama” look to them
This is a personal aesthetic/navigation thing, but i always think that photo galleries are much more user-friendly if they have a collection of true thumbnails leading to the larger images.
You say that your pictures are “large thumbnails,” but in order to see all of your images the user needs to scroll and scroll and scroll, and i think that’s a bad strategy for online galleries. I think that using smaller thumbnails, and thumbnails on multiple pages (if necessary) with navigation arrows, is a better solution that makes navigation easier and allows the viewer to pick and choose which photos to enlarge.
There are plenty of gallery templates available free on the web; some use Javascript, but quite a few are plain old CSS and work great. And you don’t even need anything that complicated, if you don’t want; a plain old table can be perfectly decent for laying out small thumbnails.
One thing I don’t like about flickr is how you have to jump through a few hoops to see full-size pictures. For a site that’s main purpose is to show photos you get a very tiny default size on the pictures shown. mhendo I want to turn the page into a grid-pattern of small thumbnails leading to seperate pages (per image) of larger images, with the comments and extra info included on the larger image pages.
But I want to keep the ‘big thumbnail’ page as an option. I personally like being able to scroll a page of medium sized images and then being able to click one to see it full size.
In other words I intend to take on board your suggestion
Arse testicles. I just lost a big edit to that post. Grr!
Anyway. Another reason to use PHP/ajax and so on is a) to learn those technologies and b) to automate as much as possible. I am quite lazy by nature so I want to make the end product as conducive to laziness as possible. If I have a gallery that requires too much work each time I want to update it - I’ll never update it. One of the aims of this gallery is to enable me to just dump some pictures in a secure folder and have the code do the rest.
edit: I realize there’s a bit of a contradiction there. I could use one of the existing products to ‘do the rest’. But I want to learn to write the code that ‘does the rest’ myself. but I don’t want to have to do a lot of work each time I use the thing I’m creating.
I am ironically not lazy when it comes to creating things designed to facilitate laziness
I’ve worked on it since… (Removed the requirement to log in as guest. Added smaller thumbnails at the top. Moved it from a ‘beta’ URL. A few minor behind the scenes changes.)
The new URL is notails.com - photography - Isle of Man (or just go to notails.com and click on photography)
It is very much still a work-in-progress. And I’m still open to suggestions*.
[sub]*I’m mainly interested in feedback on the gallery design/logic, but you are welcome to make suggestions/comments on the content too[/sub]
