New Photo Gallery

Sorry to keep you all waiting for the photos of our trip to Paris last weekend. I’ve been busy putting the final touches on a new bit of software that I’ve written to nicely display all our photos on this website. You can find the result via the “Our Photos” link above.

The new gallery organises our photos via ‘tags’ rather than into discrete albums. Every time we take a photo, we download it from the camera into an application called F-Spot which organises the photos and lets us tag them with tags to describe the content. A tag is just a short one or two word descriptive phrase and we can attach as many tags to a photo as we like.

Once we’ve tagged all the new photos we then go through and give the best ones a special tag called ‘Favorites’ which marks them to be exported onto the website. Then there is some magic that you most probably don’t care about that takes place to copy the phone from our computer up to the webserver where you can view it and comment on it. The big benefit of this new process is that it takes much less time to get new photos up on the website than it previously did, so after future trips you now have justification to hassle us if the photos aren’t online after 1 or 2 days.

The key point to remember is that our gallery doesn’t have albums anymore, it has tags. So to see all the photos from our recent Paris trip you just click the word ‘Paris’ that appears in the tag cloud on the front page of the gallery. If you’re impatient here are all our photos tagged ‘Paris’.

One final point, if you’re using Internet Explorer to read this, then you’re partly to blame for why it took me so long to get the new gallery working. Internet Explorer is a broken, slow, insecure and ancient web browser that is the bane of any web designers existance. To make webpages look good and work properly in Internet Explorer takes hours of extra effort above and beyond what is required creating the page. By contrast all the other browsers like Safari (for Macs), Firefox and Opera work perfectly with minimal effort.

Save my time, and make the entire Internet a better place, if you’re using Internet Explorer you can switch to Firefox with one easy download. It will even automatically import all of your bookmarks from Internet Explorer so you can still find your favourite sites easily. Simply click here, then click on the big green button, run the installer and then say ‘yes’ when it asks if you want Firefox to be your default browser. Thank You 🙂

Comment from Craig on 2007-11-19

Very styly, though the link generated when I comment looks like so:
http://www.mattandkatbrown.com/gallery/photo/http%3A%2F%2Fcraig.dubculture.co.nz%2F