So I’ve been working on this site on the side for a couple of weeks now. Ive mostly just been waiting around for content for the site. This was a different kind of site for me to create because I needed to find a way to make it easy to update for someone who has little or no knowledge about the web.
First thing I did was use photoshop to automate the thumbnail creation process. This turned out
to be more useful than i thought as it also let me create medium size pictures for viewing within the site as well as very customizable watermark options. This was all part of the “Web Photo Gallery” option which basically created a little mini site on the fly. This is nice and all however if the photographer ever wanted to edit the site or add more pictures all he would know how to do is create new sites on top of the old one. This could work, however i wanted a more logical solution.
Now that I have two folders (thumbnails and images) All the client would have to do is drag the contents of the folders into their respective folders on an easily accessible ftp account I’ve made for them.
Next, I wrote a pretty basic PHP script that reads the contents of the folder, how many files are in it, and displays them in a 4 x 3 table with a POST variable controlling the pages. This was my first attempt at this kind of organization tool but it worked on the first try.
My next step is to generate Titles for the pics using the pics built in meta data. This is so the client can add titles and photo information from within Photoshop, making the process that much easier. Making this site has been a wonderful learning experience. Go and check it out.