IMS_Blog

Given that my hosting (with the excellent Dreamhost) gives me more file space than I can use (and keeps growing faster than I can fill it)—with bandwidth to match—shoving a load of large images into my own webspace isn’t too much of an issue.

My (not vast but still larger than I can handle through memory) collection of photos is organised using Picasa—which while not being a cutting edge image editing package (fire up the gimp or something for that), is very good at the end user experience of what it does. That fact led me onto Picaweb a PHP based system to integrate online photo galleries with Picasa’s export to web option. Install wasn’t exactly a breeze but that wasn’t really Picaweb’s fault. The way PHP is set up meant various things weren’t quite pointing where they were meant to be so a bit of find/replace hackery needed to be added to the codes. The templates where simple enough to edit though, which allowed me to quickly get to the final result.

Just set up there are only two albums currently in place (warning: large images lie ahead). Of course there are some of Pepe and, perhaps more interestingly, some of the fireworks which Rachel and I saw. None of these have been touched or manipulated in anyway to look nicer, just taken straight from cameras.

Update: Having sung the praises of picaweb I decided it just wasn’t powerful enough for me (and didn’t have the problem that the main photo view was really the full size image being scaled down by CSS—not great for load times), so the galleries have been changed over to run off Gallery. Gallery 2 includes a still in it’s infancy module to import Picasa albums (thanks to Google’s summer of code—see also this forum post which helped me get it installed—interesting in itself as it involved playing with CVS!). Other than the Picasa module installation of Gallery was actually a breeze (it wasn’t until I did it I realised that Dreamhost actually have a one-click install of Gallery available!) Hacking around the templates which the PHP uses to produce all the pages took quite a bit longer to get to where I wanted to be. Anyway, links which referenced the briefly present old version have been updated to point to the new version, which can be still be seen in the same place.