John Mee – Some programmer in Sydney

I decided to create a photo gallery to

1. show off the best of my old travel photos, and
2. to quickly and routinely share new photos with friends after events

The requirements evolved to

1. display long captions – to tell the story
2. arbitrarily sorted presentation – to tell the story
3. drop images into a directory and we’re done – quick

In the past I’ve cobbled together solutions, a favourite of which is to put all the photos into a directory, create a text file of captions, create an html template file, and finally run a hand-built perl script over it which generates a static html gallery. Two complaints with this is that my html templates are very plain – I’m no graphic designer – and I can never find the perl script again – or don’t have a perl installation handy. It just doesn’t work out very often. So I’ve gone wandering with my latest favourite problem solving methodology: what do the non-programmers do?

A wander of the web and you find people doing some very pretty things using a variety of technologies.
There is a good list of options here that I worked through.

• SmoothGallery: CSS, AJAX (mootools)
• Slimbox/Lightbox: CSS, AJAX (mootools)
• SimpleViewer: Pure Flash
• CSSPlay: Pure CSS

There were also a few using script.aculo.us which I can’t be bothering finding again. These libraries demonstrate how far AJAX has come. I find it intimidating to discover how fast we must all run to keep up with the pace of developments these days.

I seriously considered digging out my scripts and prettying up the html template with some of the CSSPlay ideas, but then the amount of development effort involved stopped and reminded myself of the methodology: what do the non-programmers do?

I dug around for some polished gallery applications a couple of months ago and just couldn’t find anything impressive. This time Zenphoto emerged. It meets all the requirements. It’s more polished than WordPress. Needs php and mysql. You can skin it with any of the eye candy solutions above. And the code is beautifully clean. I’ve immediately been able to start tweaking it to suit myself! Thumbs up. You know you’ve found something you like when you spend hours trying all the different colors and options.

Wanna see my slides?!!?
Photos from ‘the big trip’ around Canada and the USA