Project: Photo Gallery System

	Gallery Thumbnail View

Organization

Flying Pylon Photography, a small personal photography site created by Paul Woods to share photos and photographic knowledge.

Project Description

Paul had been interested in photography for a long time, and had always wanted to build a web site that would allow him to share his work with people. Though there were plenty of software products that would generate static web-based photo galleries from a collection of images, none of them seemed to fit the bill.

	Full-Size Photo View

Paul wanted a system that would allow him to add features to the gallery easily, update the look and feel of the pages at any time, allow visitors to specify their viewing preferences and leave comments, and not lock him in to any particular software application.

Solution

Paul developed a solution that met all of his current requirements yet is flexible enough to adapt to future requirements as well. The key to the gallery system is that it makes heavy use of XML, which allows data-based functionality without requiring that information be stored in a true relational database system.

	Technical Info View

The photo gallery system includes the following features:

• New galleries are uploaded to the web site as a collection of images and an XML file. Upon verification, the images are automatically moved to the appropriate location and the XML data is inserted into the master XML file of all galleries and photos.
• For each page on the site, a specified number of random photos can be pulled from a list of all photos available on the site. Functionality is included to ensure that photos are not duplicated on a given page.
• Multiple sizes of each photograph are available, and visitors can specify which size they want to view by default when they click on a thumbnail image.
• A special "technical info" view is available that displays all of the IPTC data (title, caption, keywords, etc.) and EXIF data (shutter speed, aperture, etc.) for a given photo.
• For larger galleries, the number of thumbnails displayed at one time is variable, and visitors can specify how many they'd like displayed by default.
• Photo titles are always displayed when a visitor hovers their mouse pointer over the thumbnail image. This is true not only when the images are displayed as part of a gallery, but also when they are displayed in a collection of random photos.
• Visitors can leave comments on certain pages of the site, any gallery, and any individual photograph.

If you'd like to know more about the process used to prepare the photographs before they are uploaded to the site, visit the Tools...Techniques section on the Flying Pylon Photography web site.

Current Site

Flying Pylon Photography