The photo gallery is now feature complete. It now has all the basic features a gallery needs to show pictures. You can navigate folders, and view the images in them utilizing thumbnails of the images. I’ll be adding more feaures later, when I have some time, but the basics are now all out of the way. I’ve also corrected some bugs I found in the folder selection code that leads to some nasty errors. I probably need to do some things to make it more robust (would have hidden those bugs), but that will come in time too. Enjoy my thousands of images.

Well, after much searching, reading, and testing I decided I wasn’t going to find a gallery plugin for WordPress that I was going to like. I spent a little too much time trying. Anyway, I decided to go ahead and just write my own. It’s coming along quite quickly. I’m not done yet, but I’ve got most of the framework laid out. I’m sure I’m mostly left with corner cases being errors. Then I need to clean things up and make the interface a little more intuitive. You can already take a look (use the link from the right menu column) and see what I’ve got. No links to the larger versions of the pics yet, but that’s very quick and easy to do. Here are the features I really wanted and yet was unable to find:

• quick and easy additions
• no database required
• fairly standalone unless it’s a WordPress plugin
• no automatic thumbnail generation
• light server load
• decently standards compliant output
• no HTML tables if possible

I’m happy with what I have for how much time I’ve spent coding it (maybe an hour and a half). It won’t take much more to get “enough” functionality that I can leave enhancements for later.

I’ve been working on the site a bit lately. I discovered that IE didn’t show the PNG images very smoothly. So, I replaced some of them with JPEGs. Looks better in IE now. Turns out it’ll save me some bandwidth as well. I need to finish up the rest of the header images and get them rotating again. Then I’ll figure out what I’m going to do about my gallery to get it doing what I want.

I’ve created several more header pictures and altered some WordPress code to randomly load them. Some I’m quite sure I like. Others, I’m not so sure. We’ll see what stays. Also, these were all done from the same airshow. Maybe I ought to dig out some other pics to work from.

Side note, I finally tried to install Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 that I bought years ago. It wouldn’t go. I never even got an initial screen. So, I used Paint.NET. It rocks!

Things are coming along. I managed to adjust the template to better suit me (removed the Flickr stuff). To try and not use anybody else’s media/images, I’ve replaced the top image with something I photographed. I kind of like this picture, but it’s far from a final word. I’m gonna make some more from my photogallery and see what works. Maybe I’ll even make the image randomly rotate out of a set. I’ve also been researching into integrating my photogallery into this blog. From what I’ve seen I think I’ll build something custom out of Mig. I really want to avoid getting too complicated with all this.