question about photo gallery

[mrdeeye]

ok im makin this photo gallery for my moms work....my site is done with html/css. i got the thumbnail part all dont, but im tryin to figure out how to do the actual picture part. do you think i should have a pop up window and make a page for each picture and just do it that way so they click on a picture and it pops up and they can click thru each image that way? or is there another way im not thinking of? thanks in advance

[=uNiTy=]

ok. i'm not quite sure what you want it to look like, but i just recently finished a section on my site that you may want to have a look at. you can view it here. also feel free to check out the whole site, as i have been working on it almost everyday for about a month now. anyway back to the subject... on my page, i actually have 2 images for each photo; one fast loading .gif for the page where all of the pictures appear upon the page loading, and another relatively high quality .jpg of the actuall photo to be viewed. my hosting plan includes 50mb of storage, but yours may differ, if that's the case, you can always resize the image with html and only use one copy of each image. also if you want, you can view the source of the page, (yes it's all there css and everything!!!) umm... yea also beware that if you do use html to resize the image, you will see some distortion if you resize it significantly. also take note that you can hev higher quality and pics larger in actual file size, with a .jpg than with a .gif, but the latter will provide fast load times and acceptable image quality, despite its small size. well, i hth.

[kram 2.0]

On another note, when I asked about a photo gallery, glc recommended me a program called Irfan Viewer - reduces the sizes and creates all the thumbnails for you. Just an easy tweak of the template does it . I personally like the pop-up method - where you click on a thumbnail of probably around 100xsomething wide. I have to agree with Unity that it's generally best to utilize the CompuServe format (GIF, pronounce it as you wish) on the thumbnails, and subjectively small images.

Hope that helps,
kram

[mairving]

Several things to consider. One is how it looks. The other and biggest is how easy is it to maintain. In other words, are you going to have to go back in a create thumbnails, pages, links, etc. everytime they need to add a new picture. That is why I usually try to give the person a little ownership of doing their own stuff so they won't have to call me everytime they have a new picture. The way =uNiTy= does it is fine. You display a thumbnail, don't build a page for the full image but instead just link to the full size image. The disadvantage to doing that is that you can't use HTML so it will have a plain background. You can also use JS to create a pop-up window that works pretty well but this is a little more work.

So with that in mind, if your host supports PHP, I recommend either Gallery or Coppermine. Both are free and both allow you to upload the image and create albums. They create the thumbnails for you.

[mairving]

Originally Posted by kram8806 I have to agree with Unity that it's generally best to utilize the CompuServe format (GIF, pronounce it as you wish) on the thumbnails, and subjectively small images.

It depends on the image. Some images look better as jpeg's. Others look better as gif's. For the most part, unless the image is black and white and/or has visible text in it, you should use a jpeg. The jury is also still out whether gif's will be around much longer with Unisys trying to extract royalties from people for their use.