I’m working on getting a gallery created. A place for me to upload pictures for viewing and such.
I’ve been writing my own; nothing really fancy, but a fun project.
I’ve also been looking at a few other pre-made versions.
Whichever way I go, I still haven’t figured out what size of photo I should put up on the site. The source material is 3000×2300 pixels; they are usually 2.5mb in size. I think those might be a bit overkill… but I’m not sure what size people are after.
So I’m left with a few things I can do:
- Upload huge versions and let ya’ll downsize as you want
- Upload not so huge versions and e-mail you huge versions on request
- Upload small thumbnails and e-mail sizes requested.
Considerations:
- convience to users
- space used on webhost
- bandwidth
( #3 isn’t really an issue to me right now, but it’s a valid consideration.)
Thoughts?
My preference is to upload not so huge versions. When viewing pictures online, I’m looking for online quality – 1200×1600 is as large as I’d go for that.
The larger full size versions don’t add anything in photo quality for online viewing, they just take longer to load. And they still print fine, when you are printing to just share the pictures offline. Not photo quality prints, of course, but often that’s not what you’re really after at that point.
And that’s before all other considerations; if size and time and all of that were not issues, I’d still go for the 1200×1600 before the 3000×2300.
If space on webhost and bandwidth become issues in the future, the 800×600 size is also plenty big for online use.
And for the photos that we do want to have a photo quality print, we can e-mail requests.
That’s my opinion, since you asked for it.
Here’s a test of a gallery that I found interesting:
http://www.4101.org/gallery/
check that out and let me know what you think of it’s performance
There are a few pictures that are expecially nice… pictures that may someday make it into print, but most files are fine at 800×600. Perhaps a file that has quite a bit of detail would require a larger file size…
(you will be keeping the large file yourself?)
My first thought was that you could upload larger files of the ones you thought worth it, and i still think that would work for most. Some pictures are obviously special, but there is that unpredictable personal preference factor.
If you don’t want to email requests, perhaps you could make a place where we could request a larger file size so the next time you worked on the page you could upload it. If you do not want to leave the large size on forever, you could leave it there for a month (or for a week if you drop a note to let us know it is there).
(Actually, if bandwidth is an issue, I could set up a place for you to upload the large pictures to me on the white site.)
Bandwidth isn’t an issue for this website, honestly.
I could put up every large picture I have of Aleah (say, 200mb worth) and both of you could download them all every day of the month and I wouldn’t come close to touching my bandwidth limit.
For the hosting I’m on, bandwidth is less of an issue than processor usage on the server. And no, they don’t give me a way to know how much processor usage I have. That’s a different topic though.
Right now I’m thinking that the software that’s out there would work for what I want, but the features I’m after are really only going to be found with software I write.
the one you are trying looks fine
Here’s a question: has anyone else gotten “server internall errors” when running that gallery?
I have and wonder if it’s just me or if everyone gets them.