In my previous posts, I talked about the desire to switch from paying for a commercial photo gallery and instead hosting it on my own site; testing out a bunch of plugins and options to embed the photo gallery directly into my WordPress site (i.e. this blog) rather than hosting separately; figuring out problems with Piwigo plugins to make sure I could get it to work with photos AND video together; and finally working through a bunch of options around theme choices and a challenge with my layouts.

Generally, after all that, it puts me in the world of having a working gallery. Or more accurately, a shell of a gallery. I still have to populate it. This is going to fall into four main phases, and it isn’t exactly “light” work. It is pure, unadulterated grunt duty.

Phase 1: Upload my files

Sure, upload my files. Sounds easy enough, right? But we’re not talking about a click-and-upload solution with one fell swoop. There are some options to do that, but it does mean spending a lot of time to either set up a separate set of files (my stored photos on my harddrive go chronologically, and includes subfolders both for photos I want to upload and subfolders for the “also ran” pics that are either duplicates of other shots, or someone is squinting, or whatever). I do occasionally go back to them looking for good shots where, say, Jacob looks awesome in the photo, but I need to crop out two other people. Not worth the effort for a standard upload, but if I was looking for a good shot of JUST Jacob, then I’ll look through the extra photos too. Which means unlike some ruthless digiterati, I don’t just delete those extra shots. To give you an idea of volume, some of my uploads in a year might be 1000 photos over the course of multiple weddings, trips, day to day events, etc. But that likely represents 3000-4000 photos and videos in total. Call it 1 in 3 or 4 that are good enough to share. Why does that matter? Because I can’t just click a single folder and upload everything in it. 75% of the photos don’t get uploaded, so it’s a bit more manual of a process. They’re all presorted, I’m not redoing that work, but it isn’t as simple as clicking a root folder and uploading everything under it.

I downloaded DigiCam as a photo manager as it has an option for uploading photos directly, but it was only marginally better than doing it by hand in a web browser, with a couple of bad work process things too (dangers of “synching” and losing stuff).

So I’m uploading. Since I’m going back to 2005, plus I have other types of photos in there (memes, comics, HR charts, a few other things that only I can see for work purposes), it will likely top out somewhere around 10K photos and videos by the time I’m done. Stored in approximately 250-400 subfolders, depending on how I organize them.

It will take time.