Tag Archives: photos

#50by50 #23 Part 2 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Test WordPress galleries

The PolyBlog
February 6 2018

In my previous post, I talked about the various approaches I have taken to hosting my photo gallery online — self-hosted, merged with Vimeo / DailyMotion / Youtube for videos, and then SmugMug. But I’ve always wanted to re-patriate the files to my main server, and my new hoster will let me do that now. Sign me up! Oh, wait, I’m already signed up!

Oh, wait

The “oh wait” moment was that I realized that I don’t have a good solution anymore for managing galleries and videos on my site. I had a separate install of Piwigo, and it caused a huge load problem with my old hosting solution. Except I realized looking back, it didn’t. It was a plugin in WP that caused the problem, and I had it again with WP on the NEW hoster later. But they were able to fix it. It wasn’t Piwigo. So I could go with Piwigo again (a full separate software install, not just added to WordPress). Or I could try finding a fully integrated solution within WordPress itself.

Lots of people run photo sites with WP as the engine. I’ve tried it in the past, even paid for some apps to try the full version when the trial version looked promising. But I’ve never found a great solution for me. It was worth a try again, but I would have three giant caveats.

First and foremost, it couldn’t mess up my media library. WordPress has a media library where it keeps your uploaded pics and videos. The default version doesn’t have much in the way of abilities to quickly sort or manipulate groups of files, so the last thing I want is 5000 pics and videos all in one little library. Whatever solution I use has to have an ability to create separate media libraries or galleries, or at least allow me to categorize and manipulate them in smaller groups.

Second, it has to handle video. There’s no real point in installing a picture gallery if I can’t manage the videos too — that’s the whole reason I struggled previously. I don’t want to keep doing it manually. If I had to do that, I might as well leave it with SmugMug.

Third, the plugin has to work relatively simply and seamlessly. Some of the ones in the past have had really complicated taxonomies, or hierarchies that made no real sense. I’m not talking simply counter-intuitive, I mean completely backwards logic. Photos go in albums, albums go in sets, sets might form a gallery. The words come from the physical world. But lots of programmers have inverted those taxonomies to put images in sets that go in galleries that then go in albums(???) at the top of the hierarchy. WTF?

If it isn’t making my life easier, and those are the three criteria, I might as well pass. So I decided to give ten plugins a try in WordPress and see how it would go.

A. NextGen

This is the most popular gallery in WordPress, hundreds of thousands of users. And I have NEVER been able to get it to work reliably. It’s possible it conflicts with my theme choice, although I’m not sure why. It’s powerful, and it doesn’t mess up the media library. I hear its logic is stable, understandable and works. I don’t know. Because this time around, all I got was the white screen of death — it apparently conflicts with the security plugin I’m using, which blocks part of its pop-up screens for creating galleries. And while I could dance on the head of a pin to make it work, it won’t handle videos anyway. Strike.

B. Photo Gallery by Web Dorado

This one is also popular, and while I wasn’t sure how it was handling the media library or workflows, in the end, it didn’t matter — it handles video only by embeds from other sites (like YouTube), it won’t handle directly-hosted i.e. uploaded videos. Foul ball, strike two.

C. Envira

I feel a bit harsh on this one. From my perspective, Envira is basically crippleware. It says it can and will do all sorts of wonderful things. Which you can try by buying “this” plugin along with “that” addon. Strike three. One batter out.

D. FooGallery

At this point in the process, I’m looking at plugins that have over 50K users using them, and FG seemed promising for video and workflows. Except it completely messed up the internal media library. Strike one.

E. Huge IT Image Gallery

Like Envira, it has limited options without a bunch of other plugins, and no video. Strike two.

F. Portfolio Gallery

I was hopeful for this one, as it had video options, but like the Photo Gallery by Web Dorado, it only shows embedded videos, not directly-hosted. Strike three, second batter out.

G. Photo Gallery by Supsystic

Of all the galleries, I think this one was the coolest. It has a round layout, and the photos looked awesome in it. I don’t know if I would want it for all photos in my gallery, but as an option, it looked good. But it was tied into the existing media library, and it could only show videos that were already posted / embedded. Strike one.

H. Gallery by bestwebsoft

I was feeling a bit desperate at this point. I had worked my way through all the big names in photo galleries in the repository, and was now down to plugins with less than 50K users. Not looking hopeful at this point, and this one was no different. Pretty basic, and it was integrated with the existing media library. Never even got to figure out workflows or if it would handle video. Strike two.

I. Existing commercial galleries

As I mentioned, I had tried some commercial galleries previously. Social Gallery plugin was one that I tried a couple of years ago when I was hosting the videos elsewhere, and I thought at the time that I would try to just embed them. Except it has no real video options. Foul ball.

I also tried Global Gallery aka WordPress Responsive Gallery, but it too had no video options. Another foul ball.

The most promising one from the past was one called DZS Video Gallery. It has ways to handle locally hosted videos, it is separate from the media library and while a bit raw for workflow, I liked it enough previously to buy and give the full version a try. Except it never worked. I couldn’t get it configured correctly previously, and the creator offered to fully log in to my site to get it configured properly if I just gave him my full login and password, serving info, maybe the name of my first pet or parent’s middle name. Yeah, it sounded sketchy. Maybe he was on the up and up, but after buying something that he swore worked out of the box, and given I have a relatively vanilla install, the fact that it wasn’t working was not creating much in the way of trust. I just couldn’t get it to integrate and play, and I wasn’t willing to hand over admin privileges to someone halfway around the world that I didn’t know. I tried to get a refund at the time, but no luck. Live and learn, right? Anyway, I tried it again since I already own it, updated the download, still didn’t work.

Strike three, WordPress is out! Or was it?

While WP wasn’t working with standalone gallery plugins, or at least not easily, I didn’t give up on it. I tried a bunch of other plugins that allowed me to manage my media library in different ways, essentially letting JetPack and WordPress handle my gallery on their own, but it was either too manual or didn’t integrate with video. In the end, some of the galleries were pretty good-looking, but I just needed another solution, preferably a better one too.

#50by50 #23 Part 1 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Introduction

The PolyBlog
February 6 2018

Among my 50by50 goals, I have a series of inter-related ones called “get my sh** together”. Since those don’t look very nice as page titles, I’ve tweaked it a bit to make it a little more family-friendly (my son, Jacob, age 8, does read my blog, so I should clean up my act). And one thing that has annoyed me on the digital front for a very long time is my online photo gallery.

I won’t bore you with the long version of its sordid history, but the short rant is that I have a website (polywogg.ca) that I pay to host. And so I have my own domain, my own file area, relatively unlimited file storage related to the website (i.e. I can’t turn it into a cloud server, but for the purposes of a website, it’s open season). So I should be able to have a gallery for my personal pictures and video clips. But when it comes to video, almost all the basic hosters have the same limitation.

No hosting video.

If you want to have video on the site, you generally have to upload it to Vimeo or DailyMotion or Youtube (with the ownership and advertisement and privacy issues, oh my, that go along with these sites), and then link to it from your site by embedding the link in your post. It works really well, don’t get me wrong, but dealing with those video sites is a pain in the patootie. A few years ago, I was putting the videos in a password protected area of Vimeo or Dailymotion (I don’t even remember now which one it was), and linking them to a web gallery on my server, running Piwigo as the photo gallery with video embeds. It was working okay, I uploaded about 3000 photos, and then I ran into a problem with the hoster. They claimed it was Piwigo, and after a bunch of testing, frustration, and failure, I eventually killed the Piwigo site and moved everything — photos and video — to SmugMug. Like Flickr and others, it allows you to upload personal photos and videos and then share them. There are basic accounts that are free, but I would have quickly overwhelmed those limits, so I bit the bullet — and paid $80 / year to host everything at SmugMug.

Overall, it’s been great. It took me a while to get up and running, but eventually, I had it all working, so all good. Except it has still been costing me $80 a year when I’m *already paying to host a website elsewhere*. Grrr…oh, and about ten months ago, my workplace updated their firewall blacklist and SmugMug was on it (to prevent people streaming video to the office and sucking up bandwidth) — so when I do blog posts and paste pics from the site, the pics don’t show up in my articles when viewed from work or some other government sites. Which means some of my posts about HR that have pics in them don’t show properly. It has been on my list to fix, but a pain in the patootie to find an alternative, as the most likely alternative is finding somewhere where I could host everything. A new hoster, perhaps. There’s a small chicken-and-egg loop in there, move the site or move the pics, and I’ve not bothered to fix it.

As I said, most basic hosters don’t allow video. They are afraid because video can drastically suck their bandwidth, which they can’t afford to do on basic sites at basic rates. And they don’t want to charge someone $5 / month and have them start streaming movies and trailers for the masses. Except that’s not what I’m doing. I have a few personal videos per month that when posted might get watched by up to five or six people, and then it will sit dormant most of the time. Low bandwidth, nothing major. I know that, the hosters don’t, so they have general policies that say “no video” and they block it internally on the site for all their hosting accounts.

So imagine my surprise recently when I tried a video on my WordPress site and it not only uploaded, stored and loaded on a page, it actually played. WTF? It isn’t blocked? But I know it violates the general terms of service, so I contacted them and asked the question. Maybe I pay them a bit more each month or year so I could host a bit of low bandwidth video on my site? I’m paying SmugMug $80 a year; anything less than that, or potentially even a little more with it fully integrated with my website, and I’d be in digital heaven.

Their response? No extra charge, as long as it is low bandwidth, go ahead. Hallelujah and pass the upload app!

2015 – The photo scanning project

The PolyBlog
January 6 2015

The tenth item on my vaguebooking list was “10. Ten photos at a time”. (Yes, I know I jumped over #8 and #9 as I have another bit of timing stuff to do on those ones, be patient!). But this one is really, really simple.

When my mother died, I retained custody of all mom’s photo collection. Big pictures and stuff we already distributed, but the old photo albums, etc., are all in my office sitting in a bin under my desk. The collection of photos is immense. Terrifying even. Because I want to scan all of them. Digitize them, sort them, let some software package go to town on facial recognition. But it’s a LOT of photos. And the library science / archivist in me wants a complete copy before I distribute them back out to the family. No one is pressing me for them, heck most don’t even want them. But I’m going to give them a complete set on disk when I’m done. I just have to get back into it.

There are some digital scanning sites in Canada that will do it for you. $200, 1200 photos, ship them and get them back done. Great idea. Except there are absolute horror stories about each of the sites. Some don’t do the scanning themselves, they farm it out. And so the group of 5-6 up front services collapse to 2-3 actual scanner companies. With a few challenges of logistics in their operations. Some of the stories are relatively minor — photos that got missed in the scan, or were duplicated, or weren’t fully centred, etc. No big deal, although annoying of course. Of far greater worry, and this is the dealbreaker, some people not only didn’t get the scanned prints when they were done, they didn’t get all the originals back either. Some people even got 100 of someone else’s photos. I considered still doing it, with the small caveat that I would attach a sticker to the back of every photo but that still wouldn’t guarantee their return, and it’s just too risky to my taste to put the whole kaboodle in jeopardy to save the work.

So my commitment is to start doing it, 10 photos at a time (i.e. per day). At 50 a week, up to 2500 in the year, I should be done by the end of 2014. A perfect item to be tracked with the Seinfeld method. I just have to get started. That should keep me busy too. Oddly enough, the swapping and scanning is relatively simple — I can even do other things on my planning list while I’m doing the scanning. But I have to start somewhere. Soon. My goal is to start before Feb 1st, although Feb 1st could be the launch. Stay tuned.

Version 2.0 of my website…

The PolyBlog
November 16 2008

I am finally ready to start seriously working on version 2.0 of my website. Most of you never saw version 1.0 or version 1.1, which were a long time and three web hosts ago, and were mostly just collections of HTML links.

Version 1.1 was more elaborate, complete with a great logo and menu system designed by my friend Liam. I programmed most of the details in .ASP and it worked well enough for me to set up my basic structure, but I never really rolled it out fully, as modifications were hard to replicate across the site manually.

I upgraded it (or downgraded, depending on your point of view) to a more accessible .SHTML format, uploaded some reviews, created a sub-area for photos, and most recently, handled all of our wedding-related needs such as online RSVPs and links to maps and hotels.

But my plans have always been more, umm, elaborate, if not particularly complex. I was about to say obsessive, but elaborate is good. Recently I thought I would upload DRUPAL and see if I could get it to work, as there are two areas that I want to work on in the next year, and they require a bit more sophistication than my basic skills allow.

First, I envision writing a small how-to manual and putting it online — PolyWogg’s Human Resources Guide to Government Competitions. Of course, once I get it up and running, there will be updates from time to time, and my old approach just wouldn’t handle it. I also would like to get to the stage where people could contribute questions or comments, and that’s far easier to do using an out-of-the-box solution than trying to program my own version.

Secondly, photos are the bane of my existence — not the actual photos themselves, but finding a way to put them up on my website rather than just on FaceBook or Flickr. Not that there’s anything wrong with Facebook or Flickr, but presumably there should be a benefit to having my own website…like actually using it for my own content! I did have some photos up previously, and it worked okay. But it was pretty manual, and time-consuming. Plus, I want to delegate management responsibilities over to my lovely bride, and let her have the headache. The old system, being manual, didn’t allow me to do that, so again, I need a better out-of-the-box option. So, DRUPAL it is. Of course, not all of the bugs are worked out. For instance, my logo and title are in the system, fully uploaded, etc., and yet, for some strange inexplicable reason, they’re not showing up! Grrr…

Stay tuned, I’ll let people know when there’s actually something to see! Tap at you later…