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
Awesome..
everything is looking good.
I tried selectType = Best and nothing is displayed.
Re: Awesome..
Fixed that right now. I originally had a tag named ‘Best’, which I renamed to ‘Portfolio’ 🙂
the gallery looks nice.. UI is simple and intutive..
and hats off to you kalyan for following your passion.. really awesome work..
Nice work 🙂
It looks great. I liked the simple categorisation in the main gallery page. And the tags feature completes the rest.
Re: Awesome..
Tags feature in the site is really good, with tags you have to be careful in choosing the comments else pics may end up in wrong section(tag).
nice stuff
Good album!
One enhancement (when the number of photos is very large) could be to have an open directory structure. (Like dmoz) and have a search engine, which could search based on tags, photo names, biological species names etc. It might be a tough job, but probably it is worthwhile…(or may be a google serachbox within the site itself)
~sudeep
Excellent photos. One suggestion though- please, for the love of god, get yourself a proof reader or editor. The captions take away a little bit from the stunning photographs.
tag system is the way to go.. the site works fine.. as sudeep said, if the tags are searchable by google then it would be perfect..
dang.. I need to find a script like that.. haha.. then I can ditch stupid hosts and put everything on my site 😛
hey.. I did not see any commenting facility in the gallery.. for individual images.. that might be a nice addon..
when two thumnails of pics with vertical composition are placed under each other.. it appears a bit too tight.. in the tag view..
:))
I know I know.. lot of typos and I need better captions. When one has to upload 130 pics at the same time, its tough to come up with nice unique captions at once. But working on it .. thanks 🙂
Thanks for the feedback. surely want to have commenting system.. but that will have to come in the next version. Will look into the thumbnail issue right away.
Nice tool, great photos – as usual.
The search feature is next on my list. Since the captions, tags, info about the pictures are in plain text in mysql, I can write a search wrapper and pull them off. Will do soon.
The gallery looks simply great.
One small note, When I chose “all” in the front page and was browsing thru the pages there seems to be no “previous page” option.
comments (missing)
For some photos(85,33,65,74,61,60,118,58,41,29,62) comments are missing, Ignore/delete the post if you are still working on them.
neat stuff.
and yeah. as chandrahasa says it would be convinient to have a “Previous” page option. 😀
Re: comments (missing)
Wow, you sure did go though the whole thing 🙂
Those photos are just portraits, and all photos really need to have information. They have the basic caption though. I will however, will write about it, if I do get some info or anything
Inspirational
Hello Kalyan,
You’ve got a wonderful collection, and I can only guess at the degree of fun you must have had capturing these.
Keep up the good work. A lot of people look up to you for the standards you set! 🙂
-Shashi
Feature Request
There’s no “up” link only prev/next
I was browsing all the photos, and clicked on one and had to use the browsers back button to get back to the index.
Re: Feature Request
There’s no “< < Prev Page" link while browsing the index either.
only “Next Page >>”
if you are planning to add more photos, then RSS/Atom feeds would be an useful addition.
Re: comments (missing)
I came across those, while F5’ing the gallery home page 🙂
I volunteer to proof read!
You will not get paid for this though 😉
I do plan to ofcourse.. after every trip of mine. I was debating between having a rss feed for the ‘recent’ tag vs using my blog itself for it, since the images will be uploaded at once after every trip and since I will have to do trip reports anyway.
Re: Feature Request
That slipped my mind. Will add that 🙂
Re: Feature Request
Why prev page, when there is the browser back button 😀
Damn!!
I will still do it 🙂 … you won’t pay money you mean right … Dinners and lunches etc are acceptable too you know 😉
Re: Feature Request
Added that now 🙂
done maam 🙂
great site Kalyan. first correct the obvious errors in the About page. 🙂 Towards the end there are a lot of typos. nitpicking. 🙂
your wish is granted 🙂
it will be even more convenient if there is a “Previous Page” option on the last page of each category. Gee. 😀
also, after selecting a particular category, instead of clicking on the Gallery link to get to the index i clicked the Browser Back button and noticed that the tags dont get refreshed… could anything be done in this regard?
hehe thanks.. there are few things that spell checks miss out too 😉
So have you started using Canon now?
I used friends equipment for the Kanha trip. Still sticking to nikon for a while. Was not too happy with canon equipment except for the 500mm lens. Once I have the budget for the 500mm lens, then I shall move 🙂
Great collection
Hi Kalyan,
The gallery has come out very well. The snaps are awesome. Well organized and I like the tagging system. May be you want to add a feedback/comments form???
Great collection
Hi Kalyan,
The gallery has come out very well. The snaps are awesome. Well organized and I like the tagging system. May be you want to add a feedback/comments form???
Siva
An explicit link back to the thumbnails is very much needed – otherwise it is functional
Great work. I liked the place where you actually give the details of each photograph. great work again!!
Your gallery looks so amazing!! I’ve already started sending your link around! Keep it up!
one of the BR hill pics, the giant wood spider, the white spider isnt a male, the males are usually red. and the general shapes wrong too…they are known to occasionally have ‘parasitic’ spiders share their webs…check if this is one of em
Suggestions……
The site looks neat but ti have a few suggestions:
* Check for spelling mistakes. I found several of them in the descriptions under each picture.
* Some of the pictures which come up when you choose a place dosent come up when you choose just the animal type.
* Some show up only in the Cetegory – like best / endemic / behaviour etc.
* You also have some insects picture – why not have a cetegory for those too?
Re: Suggestions……
*You* talking about spelling errors?
Re: Suggestions……
LOL…..good one 😉
Re: Suggestions……
It was a suggestion for your own good. If you want to get critical, its your loss.
Re: Suggestions……
suggest stuff to *yourself* for *your* own good before suggesting stuff to *others* for *their* own good.
Re: Suggestions……
Guess it is a waste of my time talking to *Anonymous* gutless jerks. Feel free to say whatever you want – dosen’t bother me.
Re: Suggestions……
dosen’t
dosent
Cetegory
Oh My! Oh My! To make your time worth your while…
doesn’t -> the verb doesn’t change with a negation.