Finally my Photo Gallery
Last month, after the Wildlife Award, I’ve seen a big spike in users coming to my site via search engines, looking for my photographs. Except for the photographs on my blog, I really did not have anything more. So I tried to play around with few open-source gallery systems.
Almost all the OSS gallery’s are geared for travel photography, in the sense all of them have a directory style hierarchy and you are suppose to categorize your pics accordingly and place them in their respective folders. Since my pictures are wildlife ones, I wanted feature where, people can browse pictures by location, by species, or by photo type (like landscape etc).
This being the Web 2.0 age, tags are the obvious choice (Tags make a lot of sense for types of data, which you cannot query directly like photos and videos). Not a single OSS gallery system support tags in a decent way. I also want every picture to be a story, which lot of gallery system don’t let me do in a nice way. So I decided to write one myself. I’m still fixing up the rough edges, but after spending 3 weeks on it, I think it’s good enough for a public beta release. (I’m yet to package the code though)
So there : Wildlife Photography Gallery
Would appreciate feedback, on the gallery (no feature requests please), the photos and the presentation. I’ve written about every picture too, so try going beyond the thumbnail pages.
The Kanha Trip pictures are up along with my Portfolio
The pictures are awesome though the site lets down a bit…
The navigtion can be improved…Pickup some open source if you cant find time to do it yourself…No offense though 🙂
Finally!!
Have been waiting for a long time for this gallery!! Thanks.
Can you suggest a better navigation system ?
Just a couple of thoughts
If you are getting a bunch of visits from folks, you may want to :
– add adsense/ypn to them to get some $$ back for the bandwidth etc
– make them more Search Engine friendly
I also think that the watermark is a bit conservative, but that’s your call. I’m sure you could get a subtle one that overlays the greater part of the picture. Dude, people will reuse pics – you need to take precautions now. (sigh, being paranoid to the ex-paranoid 😉 )
But yeah, overall, looks good.
Re: Just a couple of thoughts
I think ads will kill the whole look and feel of the whole thing. Will stay away from it for now. Want to put it on my LJ, but LJ does not allow me to embed JS.
As for the copyright watermark, I have only done it on 50% of the pics. Still need to add them to the rest. But I don’t want to make it any bigger, coz that will start to abstruct the pciture. Even if someone does crop off the existing water mark, the resoltion of the images is not good enough for them to be useful for anyone.
Awesome pics.
this is usability aspect.
Averytime we select something from dropdown on the search page (1), it leads to respective gallery(2). Thats good.
May be a sliding seacrh menu from ur (2)results page wld help people not go back to the page 1, to navigate to other pages.
wild photography gallery
absolutely awesome photographs!!!
Haven’t looked around too much, but it looks like drupal would’ve served your purpose.
Taking drupal and hacking around a bit, that is.
Did you evaluate it before writing your own stuff?
Good point. Just took care of that. Will make few more changes later today.
Sorry if you got me wrong…I am not trying to criticize you on anything.
Yesterday I noticed that theres no way to go back to the initial pages. So thought of letting you know 🙂
That would be like using a cannon to kill a fly
, I am sure that all of the scripts which Kallu is using are a total less than 50Kb (if they are not then I would like to look at them)
Ouch, I was solely looking at the feature requests he’s getting and thinking how easily doable + maintainable this would be in drupal – without thinking how huge it would be in the first place 😐
hehe no no.. am not taking this in a wrong sense 🙂 I not only want to know if its good or bad, but also want to know what would people prefer if they do not like current system. Because since I built it, I’m sure I;m missing some obvious things. Right now I put the drop down in the thumbs page.. let me know if you think something more is needed
Lot less then 50kb infact 🙂 I agree with you to an externt.. this is a very very specific app.
Honesly, i cannot comment on drupal, coz I have not tried it. But I have seen lot of sites done with it and I think it has a good promise as a good CMS. But as tarique said, it just could be an overkill for what I’m doing now
oh thanks…
Anyway you may try and do something like this.
Cheers.
I like what this chap has done.. but think it will be overkill for my site presentation. I like it the way it is. But I think I will use this guys css for slideshows or something
🙂
btw, if you don’t mind a hand to handle feature requests, then ping.
Great Job but one suggestion
Hi Kalyan,
I have been following your site for a while now, Great Job!!. By the way, Congratulations on bagging the Sanctuary ABN AMRO Wildlife Photographer of the year 2005 title. I think it is a difficult task for one to understand what one’s passion is, and what could give him the ultimate satisfaction in life. But you have realized what makes you truly happy, and also started progressing towards it. I wish you good luck in all your endeavors.
Well, regaring the Photo Gallery, the one improvement I thought could help the users was to display the option selected in the drop down box. For instance if I select BR Hills and then select the Type as Best, it is not clear to me if my previous selection of BR Hills is still filtering the content or if it is just the type Best filter. Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Chaitanya
Hi Kalyan,
The gallery is brilliant. I have been a silent reader of your blog for some time now. Wishing you great success in your future. Hope you will be able to motivate more and more people to take up the cause of nature appreciation and conservation
yups Nice One K 🙂
I apply for the post…
Didn’t realize you would post the gallery so fast on LJ…otherwise I would have corrected some of your spellings/grammar. I hereby apply for the post of proof-reader for the text part. Would take me no time at all and would not detract from your amazing photographs. Er…spell-check doesn’t always help! You need a person from the older generation as the new generation is so much into SMS and shortening words for the computer (shrtng wds 4 comp, as they would say) that grammar,syntax and spellings are increasingly forgotten.
…But grammar and spellings are piddle compared to the real thing…the photographs!
hello kalyan varma …
hi there, u have a great thing goin here. first of all congrats on ya winning the “photographer of the year award” its quiet somethin isnt it ? cheers !
abt that nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis fella, i was plain lucky, during a survey with a scientist friend of mine who could recog the calls and followed it to find it underground. it makes the call only during its mating season just after our monsoon (like many frogs i guess). this was in the karian shola next to topslip (u been there with arumugam ! say hi to him the next time u around or may be i’ll see ya there)
will see u around … take care. wish u all the best !
suresh ganapathiappan
http://www.wildpic.blogspot.com
Re: I apply for the post…
I had to put it out for lot of reason 🙂
Will get in touch with you. Are you back in town ?
the gallery is great.
it would be good adding the “comment” feature for viewers so that viewers can comment or discuss on any photo. something like here at: http://www.rock-sea.net/nature
The tags feature is excellent.
roxy
People can already post comments in my journal :). I will mostly have a generic guestbook for people to drop in somehting. I think the page will get quite messy with comments on every picture.
you can set all comments to hide.. and users can select to show if they need. anyways, itz not a necessity. i hope to implement ur tags idea. thankz for that!
roxy
http://www.rock-sea.net
Birthday boy
Happy birthday Kalyan. I met you approximately a year ago. Wish I could be back in the peaceful forests amidst nature and the essentials rather than in the midst of a commercial, capitalist American lifestyle… but oh well, life is still good.
So much has changed for you in the past year. Your photography has taken off. Life has become more defined and taken a new direction. You’ve gained some peace and knowledge, cynicism and skills. And you’re on your way to becoming famous without even really trying to do so.
Happy birthday. I’m glad my parents have stayed in touch with you.
happy birthday dude! :))
Happy birthday! Hope it’s fabulous.
Happy Birthday man! 🙂
Hey, happy birthday!
Wish you many happy returns of the day. Be good 🙂
thank you. Non stop partying for 18 hours.. how do you except me to be good ? 😉
thanks dude. we should plan out meetup 🙂
thanks dude 🙂
thank you. Noel threw me a sexy party which lasted longer then I could handle 🙂
Re: Happy Birthday
Hey dude, I have no clue of Microsoft stuff
Re: Birthday boy
thanks a ton for that wishes. Last year has been the 1st of many things and all of them have worked out well. Let’s see what this year hold for me.
Are you folks coming down sometime ?
Sounds like fun!
Re: Happy Birthday
O……again i gont kno if u remember me.
If u remember Thank go……..U remember….
Else…….
http://www.orkut.com/Home.aspx?xid=4883706704883632356
This link will tell u my details……..
Not much time to blog……….
Me totally in to MSDN as of now.
Neways thanks for the reply….
KIT.
Happy Sankranti.
Photo Contest
Hi Kalyan, Belated congratulations.
I found this floating around and thought you might be interested…
The Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition Is Now Open for Entries. Closing Date 31st March 2006.
check http://www.nhm.ac.uk/wildphoto/comp-enter.html
# to MENTION:
1. Copyright
You must be the sole author and owner of the copyright for all images entered. By entering your images into the competition, you grant to the Natural History Museum a non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable licence to use and reproduce the images for any purpose in connection with the competition including, but not limited to, the following purposes:
2. judging the competition
* display at the exhibition of the winning entries held at the Natural History Museum and within the UK and international tours following the competition
* inclusion within the Wildlife Photographer of the Year book and magazine or similar
* inclusion within promotions organised by selected media partners (to include BBC Wildlife Magazine)
* inclusion (if selected as one of the promotional images) within the Natural History Museum’s marketing and promotional materials (including press packs) for the exhibition or touring exhibition
* use on merchandise to be sold by the Natural History Museum
* For the avoidance of doubt, the Owners will choose images from the winning images for the purposes of promoting and marketing the exhibition (and for use on merchandise). In addition, you grant the Natural History Museum the right to sub-licence images to (i) the press for reproduction in connection with the exhibition and (ii) for use by the title sponsor of the exhibition for its non-commercial purposes.
otherwise, enjoy.
sid
sidsiva at gmail dot com
I thought the captions were great!