I have owned a digital camera since 2002, but not felt that I could find the right platform for exposing them on the web. I have tried creating a website that contained galleries, I have tried tools that would generate galleries for me from tools on my local machine, but I just wasn't satisfied. Either the layout was not as I intended, the gallery urls were too parametrized, or preload of photos just didn't work well enough.
Now I have finally found an interesting setup, where all my needs(until now) have been met.
I worked with the flash based airtight simpleviewer component for a while and found it very usefull, configurable, and visually satisfying. You can configure the amount of thumbnails to display, the size of these, the layout(mostly colors and borders), the position of the thumbnails(top, bottom, left,right) and numerous other settings. The gallery information is maintained within an xml file and therefore it is easy to generate this information based on eg. images within a folder structure(I have done this before working on http://www.elileibo.com/ and http://colorrange.com/).
But still..I don't want to manually upload all the images for a gallery and the associated text files describing each picture, when what I really like to do is taking pictures and editing them.
Recently I found out that adobe lightroom 2.2 has an integrated functionality that enables you to compile a gallery(within the application), configure your ftp settings for your domain, and upload the compiled gallery as a simpleviewer gallery! This means that I do not need to spend time uploading all the files I have been developing anymore. Furthermore I do not need to write individual text files describing each image, here I just configure lightroom to add various information to the gallery (information like date information, keyword information etc.).
The last thing needed to finalize my one-click super-smooth photogallery was creating an index page displaying all the galleries on my domain. That was accomplished by writing a bit of C#, css and html(around 400 lines of code) and bada bing -
http://digitaldynamo.dk was done.
Layout is a matter of taste. I like it. Its simple and smooth. Main focus is on the photos anyway. The interesting thing here is that I now have a one-click super-smooth photogallery. I just have to compile the gallery within lightroom, tag the photos, write 3 lines of text , one for the gallery page title(displayed in the top of the browser), one describing the gallery, and the final one - the name of the folder on the ftp server. Then i simply hit "upload" and check it out on my website :)
