My photo galleries are obsolete
For the past two years, I have been hatching a diabolical plan to re-release my photo galleries on top of a homebrew photo gallery CMS (currently they are powered by Gallery 2). I figured this would be just the push I needed to actually start putting more of my photos online—and thus reaping all the pageviews that Google Image Search would throw my way.
I even made two solid attempts to get some code written. On my second attempt I finally got a working prototype up on the web last fall. But even with that milestone, I never found that critical mass to really use what I had built.
All the while, I’ve continued posting photos to my blog. In fact it’s gotten so bad, I rarely even blog unless there’s a photo involved. I know, every picture I post here is only 380 pixels wide (which my dad complains about), but in the context of a post, I have the full expressive power of HTML at my disposal to present each photo however I like. Which makes the standard title-photo-caption gallery app seem needlessly limiting.
This is the realization I came to last night. I was more enamored with the idea of building something and doing so ostensibly for the search engine fodder it would derive than for any specific passion I have for photo galleries. And that’s made pretty obvious by the fact that the last gallery I put up was from my first trip to France, back in April 2007. Given that creating photo galleries is a total chore, I have little interest in continuing to use Gallery 2, let alone replacing it with something else.
So what to do? I’m thinking it might be time to dismantle my photo galleries altogether. But I don’t want to just delete everything, that’s not cool. One idea would be to simply repatriate my galleries as post-dated blog posts, similar to how I reabsorbed the Belly of the Beasts posts. That would be a massive undertaking, filtering through over 1000 photos. But it would enable me to at least archive the content for posterity without continuing to maintain a separate app. And I could ensure some continuity with a list of redirects. This sounds like the kind of manual Sisyphean chore I could really get into.
Ooo, maybe I could write a Gallery to static HTML script…
Update: the deed is done. I’ve converted all of my photo galleries to blog posts. I like this SO much better. Everything under one roof! I tried to set things up so all the old gallery links would redirect to the right posts (not easy for 1000 photos) so if you’ve ended up here in error, my apologies.
For posterity, here’s a screenshot of how my photo galleries used to look:
If you’re trying to find a photo from one of my old photo galleries, here’s how they map to the new/existing blog posts:
- Sky
- Random photos of the sky
- Flowers
- Coker Arboretum Flowers
- Christmas 2000
- Christmas 2000
- Matthew’s High School Graduation
- Matthew’s High School Graduation
- Outward Bound
- Outward Bound
- Winter in Chapel Hill
- Winter in Chapel Hill
- Spring in Chapel Hill
- Spring in Chapel Hill
- Fall in Chapel Hill
- Fall in Chapel Hill
- Spring Break New Orleans 2001
- Spring Break New Orleans 2001
- Spencer Dorm Thanksgiving 2001
- Spencer Dorm-Era Justin
- Washington DC
- Washington DC
- Spencer Dorm-era Photos
- Spencer Dorm-Era Justin
- the Lake House – May 2002
- Spencer Dorm-Era Justin
- Graduation
- Graduation
- Almaty, Kazakhstan
- Almaty, Kazakhstan
- Chapel Hill Halloween 2002
- Spencer Dorm-Era Justin
- North Carolina Ice Storm 2002
- North Carolina Ice Storm of 2002
- Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- First trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
- First trip to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
- Second trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- Second trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and The Killing Fields
- Siem Reap, Cambodia – Angkor Wat
- Angkor ruins of Siem Reap, Cambodia
- Tanzania, by the sea
- Second trip to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
- BBQ Birthday and Kiln Opening
- recipe for a birthday
- Mark Hewitt Winter Preview
- Shiny New Car!
- i bought a car
- Spring Break Killington
- killington photos are up
- An end of the semester happy hour at He’s Not Here
- He’s Not Here Happy Hour
- Masters Graduation
- hell yeah i graduated
- Pilot Mountain
- Pilot Mountain
- Ghana – Accra plus Kakum, Elmina, and Aburi
- from la-palm royal beach hotel
- Canopy walk at Kakum National Park
- Elmina Castle
- my last observations of accra
- Hanging Rock State Park
- hanging rock state park
- Cross Country Road Trip
- driver’s seat photography
- Hiking the Grand Canyon
- tata grand canyon is bangala
- The Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands
- Saturday in the city
- Christmas in Austin 2005
- Christmas Eve in Phoenix!
- Pow! My Christmas photos are up!
- The day after Christmas, in pictures
- Letterpress I at the San Francisco Center for the Book
- Letterpress
- Katie’s Bay Area Spring Break
- Katie at Point Reyes
- Katie at Goat Rock
- Driving down California’s Big Sur Coast
- Driving down the Big Sur coast
- Hiking Yosemite on a whim
- We did not tour Hearst Castle
- Yosemite, finally!
- Snowshoeing at Sequoia National Park
- me and the sherm
- Snowshoeing Sequoia
- Lemon Cove
- Hello Paris
- Notre Dame sans bossu
- La Tour Eiffel
- Paris après-midi
- Avignon, Arles, and Baux
- La pizza Française
- Le Palais des Papes
- Dejeuner en Arles
- La famille à Pertuis
You mention doing galleries as post-dated blog posts, so why don’t you use the built in gallery that WP comes with to do this? You could even set your medium size to 380px, and insert that into posts as you blog, and if others want to see the larger size they could just click it. Rather than manually sizing each image to 380px. Just a thought.
Actually, it’s funny that you mention that, but my work hacking WordPress gallery support into my Random Image plugin pretty much taught me that I don’t really like how WordPress implemented galleries (at least pre v2.7, I haven’t upgraded yet).
I’m pretty old school as far as how I get images into my blog. But yeah, it might be time to start taking advantage of the built-in uploader at least.