Beauty everywhere
I published my first online photo album in 1997. Back then, a lot of manual editing was needed to keep the gallery running. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it since it was incredibly fun to get feedback and comments for the photos and images! Since then, I've had a few different kinds of photo albums online. But all of them have been maintained manually. And now that I want to launch a new gallery for photos and images, I am looking for a good image gallery script.
I have tried many gallery scripts but never found anyone I felt was right for me. All the big scripts (Gallery2, Coppermine, Singapore and so on) have had too many features - and they have often been very hard to customize. And the smaller scripts (Minigal, Simple PHP Gallery, Lazy Gallery and so on) have just not worked as I wanted my gallery to work. But now I am trying ZenPhoto which seems to be pretty much what I want. It is small, light, based on PHP/MySQL and it gives a lot of options for the design and layout. It should be perfectly possible to build into my website, and there are even plugins that connects the gallery with WordPress. But the technical part is not very interesting right now. What I have in mind is the purpose of the gallery. Why do I want to add a gallery? What would it add to this site? Would it be useful for anyone?
I am not any photographer, but I take a lot of photos with my little digital camera. I have taken more than 8.000 images over the last couple of years. It would be fun to make a small part of these images available to others, because I am pretty sure that there are people who could use them in some way. So one of the features that the gallery would provide would be free stock photos. Not of professional quality, but still usable and of course in full resolution. I also have a lot of digital art that I have created over the last 10 years. Manipulated photos, graphics design, wallpapers, 3d renders, resource material, design patterns and other things that has been archived for years. With an image gallery, I could make a section for free desktop wallpapers and printable art as well. It could be usable for template designers that need background images as well. A third feature would be documentation. A realtime biography in images. Good for friends, family and anyone interested in my adventures. Looking back a few years, I could post concert and event photos from the time of TSEC and Lagoona, because I have a lot of that…
And finally, a gallery would give me a chance to show you something that I think everybody should see: The incredible beauty of the area where I live! It is everywhere… I can't explain it in words, because it just doesn't work. How can I possibly describe the feeling I get when I sit by the riverside a late evening in June, listening to the water hitting the stones on the beach - under the intensive light of the midnight sun? Or the excitement I feel when I look up at the dark sky a late december night, and see the arctic light dancing right above my head? Photos doesn't give it complete justice, but a single picture still says more than a thousand words.
But as always, it takes time for me to get it done. Writing this post is a try to force myself to speed things up a bit! Comments, suggestions and feedback is of course very welcome, as always. I will once again need a couple of betatesters for the gallery once I start uploading images to it. Currently, I have only added a few old wallpapers just to test the basic functionality. But it seems to work well. Next step is to customize the design. I won't post the url to the gallery here, because it is not a supported feature and the images are not free to download and use just yet. So if you find the gallery on my site (it is quite easy), please use it with care for now!
Photos:
1. Suorva, with the magnificent waterfalls - and the Sourva dam in the background.
2. Ice crystals on the grass and on the trees, on a cold winter day in Porjus.
3. Harsprångsfallet, once a major waterfall but now dried up because of the dam.
4. Midnight sun over the Lule River in Porjus.
5. The Akkats dam - with art by Bengt Lindström, Lars Pirak and Lars J:son Nutti.
Comments
Comment from Gordon
Time: May 25, 2006, 1:44 pm
"I am not any photographer" ?
Don't you believe it, Andreas.
The pictures are great - and thanks for sharing them.
Comment from fredrik
Time: May 25, 2006, 2:32 pm
My 5cents .. I love pixelpost, I know its a photo blogging system, but there are archives and categories. Pixelpost.org
Comment from Mark
Time: May 25, 2006, 5:35 pm
All I have to say is WOW. Those photos are beautiful! You do justice to very hard to capture scenes. I remember living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (here in the US) and we would see the Northern Lights (or Arctic Lights). There are no words for their beauty. You are lucky to call such a scenic place home.
Just discovered your site a few weeks ago and I'm very impressed. I'm using the andreas08 template for my site (with some modifications for WordPress) and you've motivated me to learn more about CSS after using straight HTML for years. Keep up the good work!
Comment from seanrox
Time: May 25, 2006, 6:02 pm
I also need a good gallery solution that's word press friendly and have also tried the ones you've mentioned. I'd love to help you with the project and be a beta tester. I'll contact you off site directly to discuss more.
Comment from Matt
Time: May 25, 2006, 6:37 pm
love the pics, reminds me that i need to get away from the city
also the wallpapers aint to bad either bit overpowering for my liking though ;)
Comment from Tom
Time: May 25, 2006, 6:55 pm
I might able to help you build a gallery as you wanted the way it to work but it won’t work within WP though :(
Comment from Andreas
Time: May 25, 2006, 7:04 pm
I've seen jAlbum and a number of similar gallery generator solutions, but I prefer to run it as a script on the server - and ZenPress is the script I like best so far. I actually used Pixelpost to run a previous version of this site for some time (a few years ago) and I released a couple of themes for it. I remember that I liked it a lot, and I will actually check it out again to see if I can use it for some other project.
The wallpapers are a bit wild, as it is images I've done just for the fun of it over many years. In the future, I'll make sure to provide the wallpapers in more sizes. Most of them are 1280×1024px since I've used that resolution for more than six years now.
Comment from Andreas
Time: May 25, 2006, 7:08 pm
Tom: Thanks, but ZenPhoto does the job well so far. I may possibly end up using only WordPress in the end, I haven't decided about that yet. But whatever I do, I will need the gallery to be a natural part of this site.
Comment from LobsterMan
Time: May 26, 2006, 1:20 pm
Amazing pics!
Comment from Brandika
Time: May 26, 2006, 2:28 pm
Awesome pics! You may not be a professional photographer but all those pictures you showed us looks very professional. I love the sunset.
Have you tried 4images?
Comment from yugnats
Time: May 26, 2006, 4:28 pm
hey andreas, i have been using fGallery and it integrates with wordpress. i have found it difficult to work with with certain themes though. i have been testing zenphoto as well and it seems like a great little app. love the pics by the way :)
Comment from Ron Crowder
Time: May 26, 2006, 10:04 pm
Hey there. Im new to photo albums but as far as I can tell jalbum with the theme foto player lays out my images real nice. I like your images. Reminds me of where I live which is Central Oregon. Thanks too for allowing others to use your songs, real nice for web backgrounds
Comment from Benny
Time: May 26, 2006, 10:16 pm
Hi!
Well, as we all know, Sweden is a wonderful country and the north of Sweden is even more wonderful … I suppose you are almost into "the_sun_don't_go_down_at_night" as of now … again, nice pic's and i like to see more of them!
Andreas, you did tell us all about a domain name a few weeks ago - here is my domain name and i wonder if i am just stupid or this might be something. Maybe a legal matter but as long as it will be something :)
http://www.nikepod.eu - my first .eu domain name … and a day ago Nike and iPOD announced that they will do magic together …
Have a nice weekend ya all !
// Benny
Comment from Neil
Time: May 28, 2006, 8:44 pm
Great photos man.
Comment from DJ_Xander
Time: May 29, 2006, 10:57 pm
The pictures are like the beginning of Into my Dream in both original and accoustic versions. There's no place like Jokkmokk and Northern sweden. Better than Canada… Beautiful, Peaceful and Natural. Inspirating.
See you soon!
Comment from TimJayKo
Time: May 29, 2006, 11:05 pm
Hey!! I am honored to come across your home on the web!!! I too am considering attempting to create a home studio for music production. I might be moving out with a good friend soon (graduating high school), and then is when we might create a studio and company name etc. If you have any words of wisdom/advice I would be honored greatly (again) to hear them, and if you ever want to exchange comments through google chat/msn etc. I am all eyes and fingertips!!!
TimJayKo >V
Comment from Elludovico
Time: May 30, 2006, 4:41 am
Love your pics….really nice!! Hope you'll find what you're looking for!!
Comment from doug
Time: May 31, 2006, 4:39 am
Andreas - you are too modest - your images are very good. Noticed above you are given ZenPhoto a try. I gave it a test run over the past weekend and found it fairly easy to add my own template styles (css) to integrate it with an existing template. I have it running well within a php-Nuke module and as a stand-alone. I like what I see so far and plan to use it… maybe even offer it to clients as well.
Comment from Filip
Time: May 31, 2006, 4:09 pm
Maybe you can use this script, works good : http://www.zinkwazi.com/wp/scripts/
greetz
Comment from Dr.D
Time: May 31, 2006, 10:05 pm
Impressed.
Comment from Erik
Time: May 25, 2006, 9:10 am
You might like jAlbum. Everything is done via html. No databases to mess with for good or bad.
Another photo organization tool I've used in the past is plogger. It's pretty lightweight and integrates into websites pretty easily.
Or you could always go for a flickr account.
Nice Photos by the way.
Erik