The Akashic Field Chronicle

The Filipino Christian Church (301 Union Ave., Los Angeles, CA)

Pictures while jogging around campus

I had a little slack time (i.e. I was feeling lazy) and decided to hack me up one of those photo galleries that seem to be standard issue nowadays on most blogs. I’m not much of a photography expert. In fact, all I have is a point-and-shoot camera which isn’t even mine.

Still, I thought it would be great to have a photo gallery that’s integrated into my blog. That way, I could refer to pictures from my posts and also use a particular post to let people know if I’ve uploaded a new album. Kinda like how multiply.com does it, but with so much more control and right here on my blog.

Some guidelines

Here are a few issues I considered when building the gallery for my blog.

• I don’t really have a lot of webspace to host full albums in my own server. Good thing there are loads of services on the web that will do exactly that for you. A lot of people like Flickr, so I chose that and went ahead and created an account.
• I needed to find a plugin for werdpress that will do all the work for me. I’m not much of a web programmer so building one from scratch was definitely out of the question. Besides, with this great Flickr Plugin for WordPress, designing my own gallery was plain dumb.
• I wanted something that would allow me to create a blog post whenever a new album is uploaded to my account.
• It also has to be aesthetically pleasing and should look at home with my current theme.

My First Album

Here’s my very first album for my gallery. These pictures are from the recently held WordCamp Philippines 2008.

WordCamp Philippines 2008

Just go to the Gallery page (menu bar on top) to view my filckr sets (i.e. albums). Or click the picture above to go directly to that album.

Some Issues

The plugin worked great for my needs but of course there are some minor kinks that needed (or still needs) a little tweaking to be workable.

• Your Flickr API key (needed for the installation) won’t work until about 5 mins. after you create it. I was so excited to make it work that I thought something was wrong when Flickr was complaining that my key was invalid. Apparently, you just had to wait a bit.
• The look and feel of the default template was just not working for my theme. The album view was a bit cluttered for my tastes, showing all the pictures as thumbnails. I just wanted a single photo as cover for the album. A few changes in some php and css files ironed it out really well.
• I still think the look is a bit too bare but my web styling know-how is not enough to improve it significantly. So for now, I’ll just have to be satisfied with it.
• When clicking on the cover picture (at the Gallery page), you are directed to the specific page for that picture. It would have been better if it directed you to the album page, since that’s the use of a cover page.
• Uploading big pictures is too slow using my connection (and a bit costly in terms of my free flickr.com bandwidth limit). So I downloaded the jUploadr program (available sourceforge.net) which automatically resizes as well as uploads your pictures to flickr.

Head on over to my gallery section and test drive it. Don’t forget to comment on this post if you encounter any bugs or if you have any suggestions on how I can improve it’s look/usability.

Edit:

Possible show-stopper (thanks scion) – Flickr non-pro only allows 3 photosets, after that, you have to pay 25$ for 1 year. Unfortunately, the plugin I use tracks these photosets to group pictures into albums. Darn. So I guess, I’ll have to be content with a max of 3 albums for now.

Plan of action:

• Just use photosets for the 3 most recent albums
• Tag older albums so that they are still grouped somehow
• Figure out a better way!!! (if you know a solution, please comment. Note that I don’t want to host my own pics due to limited space and I don’t want to manually link every single picture)
• Get lots of MONEY from a kind soul and upgrade to Flickr pro (haha. I seriously doubt this one)

Edit: Edit:

Flickr now allows more than 3 photosets so this isn’t an issue anymore.