Our Photo Album

by Jason

In my stead, my lovely wife has been keep you all up to date on the happenings around the Heddings' home. I must admit, that my joy was ever so brief as I read her last post and before my eyes had finished the sentece regarding her first kiss; for that moment I thought she was talking about me. That probably would have just ended up making me feel bad, however, so all is better this way. Of course, I did know this before I read the post, however we men have an amazingly selective memory, especially when it comes to such things.

As far as memories go (that's the best transition I could come up with), I have been eager to find a good solution to our photo album. I believe that I have found it. We keep all of our phots on a computer here at home. Until now, I have used a custom blend of whipped PHP and a dash of SQL to keep the album running. Well, this has taken its toll on me and the computer running it. Enter JAlbum.

This is a very cool program that you give a few options to and it mucks about with all your photos, creating a static HTML version of your photo album, suitable for display on the web or a CD-ROM (all through a browser). Even thought it is static, it has some very cool features. I invite you to browse through Our Photo Album and see what you think. Remembering that this was all generated from JAlbum. Well, so that's not entirely true. As well as you all know me by now, I'm not content to just use something because it is available. So, I wrote my own series of skins and plugins for JAlbum to get to this look and feel (I know, it looks just like it did before... to you).

Some interesting features of our album:

• Custom slideshow page to use Patrick Fitzgerald's Javascript slideshow.
  
• Link to originals which live at a different location outside the visibility of the site.
  
• Seperate EXIF page containing full contents of 'meta' variable (see later years for better EXIF examples).
  
• Industry standard abbreviated EXIF for each slide that has it.
  
• Nearest neighbor thumbnails on slide closeup pages.
  
• Breadcrumb trails as you navigate the site (adapted from the example on the scripting page)
  
• Custom album information (date, location, caption, etc) description using a file in the album folder.
  
• And of course using the command-line interface, it is all automatically generated each night.
  

Now, all of these things may seem trivial, but without boring some of you with technical details, please just trust me: it's a bit of a challenge. For some of the better examples of EXIF and the like, check out the later years (scanned photos don't have very interesting metadata).