Sharon and Jacques’ Excellent Blog

I’ve spent a very busy weekend installing new software for displaying galleries of images. I wanted something that was better integrated with Wordpress (the software that does the blogging). The old software that I had is about 9 years old at this point and it shows.

The new integration let me posts shots from galleries. If you click on the Album title, it will take you to the gallery. Clicking on the image will open it up in a frame called a Lightbox. Try both! 

The new gallery software (quaintly called gallery2) is open-source and free and its pretty good. Configuration is a bit of a nightmare but after a few days of brushing off my Unix skills and lots of reading I think I’m good to go with it.

Some of the interesting features are

• tag clouds (a la Flickr) - the bigger the word, the more images there are of that category. Its available as a standalone pick or on the side navigation bar
• Google Maps/Earth of GPS encoded images - This is very cool. It’s amazing that you can use a digital camera to take a picture that contains the exact date, time and location of a picture, then plot it on top of a satellite image
• Updated look and feel - Sharon felt that black was way cooler
• User registration and comments - if you register as a user, you can comment on specific images and let others see your comments using Add Comment
• The slideshow is much improved
• The email postcard feature is much nicer
• You can subscribe to albums with a RSS reader
• Clicking on a tag will generate an album of all pictures with the same tag

There are many, many more features. You can play with it all at http://www.giraud.com/gallery2.

Over the coming weeks, I will be moving over the newer pictures and galleries working backwards while also adding new content. I will not be adding new content to the old system and it will be phased out once I have converted everything.

If you have any comments or questions, please let me know.