web New photo pages

Posted January 7, 2006 • Comments Off on New photo pages

My photo pages (always linked at the top of this page and available at http://www.kostia.net/photo) have been undergoing repeated facelifts of late. You may have noticed a bunch of missing files, and you may have noticed an ad for a casino. Those were speed bumps.

The software I use to organize my photos (including things like rotating, fixing red-eye, and so on) is iPhoto. But iPhoto has never had the publishing features I need. There’s a plugin to upload to Flickr, but I can’t use Flickr, as I have thousands of photos and would be way over the free bandwidth limit, and I don’t want to pay beyond the hosting space kostia.net already has. Besides, the plugin (FlickrExport) puts my comments and keywords into the Flickr photo titles, and that made me uncomfortable because I use people’s full names as search terms.

iPhoto has built-in web exporting, especially if you have a .Mac account, which I do, and there are plugins for iPhoto like BetterHTMLExport that purport to put your albums up on the web more easily, but both those solutions seem geared toward people who want to put up one album at a time (Jenny’s Fifth Birthday and such). Neither creates nested file structures where people can drill down from one library collection into the multiple albums inside.

So for years (since before I even got a Mac, actually) I’ve been using JAlbum, which does what I want (and actually defined what I want). But somewhere in the last year or so I hit some wall where JAlbum’s very handy built-in FTP client would no longer reliably upload all my stuff without crapping out halfway through.

I’d use my excellent FTP client, Transmit, but the same thing would happen. I’d have to quit and restart a few times to get the connection back after uploading a couple hundred photos. And since what I really love about JAlbum is the virtually unlimited number of choices for what my photo albums can look like, I found myself running resizing and reuploading operations a lot. Transmit couldn’t keep up. If my computer didn’t travel with me, I would host the site from home. Uploading has been that much of a pain.

Until today, when I finally read the help file and learned about the new features it has, like synchronization and linked folders and DockSend. Now it works like a charm, and now I see why Transmit wins all these awards.

I run JAlbum to create my photo and thumbnail pages. I can then either simply drag the whole “/photo” directory onto Transmit’s icon and let it go, or I can run Transmit and click “Synchronize” and it will churn away without breaking the connection until everything is uploaded (like it’s doing now). It’s wonderful.

Long story long, my photos are at http://www.kostia.net/photo and are in a whole new format. It’s called “Chameleon” and the color scheme is “Coffee” and it has built-in keyboard commands and slideshows (no more paging/clicking through photos! just hit space and sit back and watch!). It’s really very cool, and I like it.