New photo gallery

It turns out, Flickr's 200 photo limit [1] for their free is actually quite measly. Especially if you're the type who likes to put up every mediocre picture online! To be fair, Flickr has a paid account, called Flickr Pro, which removes the 200 photo restriction.

I could create another Blogspot, or get a Tumblr account, all of which would let me upload pictures without restriction. Sure, searching and previews would be a pain, but then again, what in life is painless? Alternately, I could jut dump all pictures into a folder and let Apache just display a listig. Or I could add all new photos, to the already existing http://srichand.net.in/photos page. Or, I could just get a Flickr pro account...

Except of course, I already pay for a webhost, for http://srichand.net.in/ . I see little reason to pay up twice the amount I pay for it, just to host some pictures. Of course, the problem with http://srichand.net.in/photos is that, I'm running an ancient version of Coppermine. The thing I do not like about Coppermine, is its Album centric approach to photo management. Every photo needs to be in an Album, requiring me to create, learn and know an entire hierarchy of photos. I'd much rather prefer to have a "bunch" of photos and tag some of the pictures I like and mark some others as favorite. Of course, the ability to create "sets" (Similar to Flickr and Adobe LR2) is an added bonus. The other problem with Coppermine, of course, is its complexity. Somehow, just somehow, at first glance, its interface looks more complex than useful.

And so, I feel the need to move off Coppermine into a simpler gallery system. What do I need? The ability to preview _lots_ of pictures on one page (Certainly not a massive waste of whitespace, the way Coppermine does). A detailed "picture" page, that shows a picture, along with its EXIF data. And the whole AJAX thing, which I've shunned so far, is probably the ideal implementation detail here. It'd be awesome to move between pictures without reloading the page. The same goes for editing the Title, Description and the Tags of the photo, without going to an "Edit" page, for each picture. And yes, batch tagging!

I'm certainly going to look around some existing systems for a bit. I am already beginning to like the Plogger system a good bit. It might need some hacking to support what I want. If not, I'll probably just go get myself a Flickr Pro account anywho.

2 comments:

  Torpedo Alert

12:51 AM

This comment has been removed by the author.
  Torpedo Alert

12:52 AM

I see. I guess going Flickr Pro is probably the best thing -- if you're not too concerned about putting pics up on their servers...I will only let Facebook take control of my life.


ps Stuck with a project submission, will probably holler after.