As an aspiring amateur photographer, I've always found it difficult to display and make available the hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures I've taken. A few years ago I switched entirely to digital photography when I realized I would always scan the pictures into the computer to display them online. My digital camera is a Nikon D50 and I use both an 18-55mm and 70-300mm lens. I also have a small point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix camera that I use when lugging around the bigger camera is too much to handle.
Yesterday I came across a small web app called picKLE, written in PHP, that creates a gallery based on the directory structure of your images. It automatically generates resized thumbnails and images using ImageMagick. All I need do is upload the folders of images. This is perfect for me because I don't want to worry about resizing images, creating HTML pages, etc. Since the program is written in PHP, I can modify whatever parts I need to.
I decided to host the gallery on my home server; mainly for storage reasons and for the time it would take to upload the images. I setup proftpd (an FTP server for Linux) on my server last night, so now I can connect to the server and upload the images using a standard FTP client. Since the server is on my LAN, uploading is lightning fast (3,500 kbps+!). It took me 3 minutes to upload 900 pictures (260mb). That would have taken about an hour had I been uploading to an outside server, such as my web host. I also realized that all of my pictures are of the highest quality; each file was around 2-3mb. I realized that was also a waste of space, so I resized all the images to 1600x1200. I don't think I'll need anything bigger than that. To give you an example of how much space I saved, the basement project gallery was 550mb before I resized the pictures. Afterwards, it was 42mb!. I used the Windows PowerToys Image Resizer application. Its an awesome tool if you have lots of images to resize. Right click on the images, choose Resize Images, choose the size and click OK. Its that simple!
To view the gallery, click the link under the pages section.
Pickle Fickle….
why didn’t you find this long long ago before I set up all these online galleries on my sites. I hate resizing all these pictures. 🙁
May have to try out the pickle.
I wish I found it earlier too! Its such a simple script! Let me know if you need help setting it up. I also did some modifications to the script to make it work the way I wanted (such as where the Home link and gallery links are located).
As an aspiring amateur photographer also…
I purchased a Rebel XT a few weeks ago. This past weekend, we went to Cedar Point Amusement Park, I took the Sony F717 because I have only a 28-55 on the Canon. My sony died. 🙁 The viewfinder / lcd screen is purple lines and the pictures turn out the same. I’ve been quoted 211 on Sony’s website for repairs.
Think I would rather go buy a lense than make the repair.
I’d say go with the new lens. Get a genuine Cannon digital lens if possible. Probably any Cannon lens will work on the XT, but I have seen noticeable differences between a regular lens and one specifically made for the digital camera.
Do you know anyone that wants a mint condition Cannon Rebel Xs with two lens’s for $200?
Just found this: I can have me cake and eat it tooo 🙂
From October 3, 2005 through October 2, 2007, Sony will repair, free of charge, affected products exhibiting the above-mentioned problem where it is caused by the image sensor device.
Still going to get another lense for the Canon.