New gallery format

After much to-ing and fro-ing and given the fact that I’ve had a few days of broken-back imposed rest, I have redone the gallery layout on flipper.co.za . There are a number of reasons for this and maybe some will make sense and others wont. The first one to run in this style is the 2010 ABSA Cape Epic – and is located at here.

First off, it’s not Flash TM anymore, it’s just very plain HTML. This will make it easier to link directly to images – which is obviously a double-edged sword. People can now link like crazy … but I’d rather they linked to the pages if you don’t mind. You can also obviously download the 800px wide images to your heart’s content now without having to go to all the hassle of doing a screencap and then cropping. But i do ask you play friendly with my livelihood and if you need to use them for something other than on your own computer please contact me. Seriously, if you do a quick search on google images for my work you will see it scattered across all the internets for all and sundry to see and, given the fact most content management systems strip metadata from images, and thus copyright, it gets kinda tricky to manage that. I am probably adding to my woes moving from Flash TM. But thats a chance i’m willing to take.

I’ve kept the metadata intact in the images, so if you wish you can check out the numbers used to take the photos check it out – maybe this helpful … and maybe I’ll eventually put it on the pages I dunno … we’ll see.

Now before the design guru’s hit me with all kinds of comments and slings and arrows about the layout – you have to remember that these will normally be done in:

a) a rush at the end of hectic week’s work;
b) somewhere exotic like a hotel foyer at 2am because the internet doesn’t work anywhere else, the front seat of a speeding car getting to an airport, or the airport itself somewhere between check-in and departure gate;
c) whenever I get the chance;
d) in an ongoing easily repeatable way.

So this mean’s it has to be quick, simple, and easy to replicate time and time again. To this end I’m talking PhotoMechanic by CameraBits. I have told most people I have come into contact with in the photo business that this software has changed my life – and i really mean that. And i truly thank the Formula 1 photog who showed me light – and whose name escapes me as I type this. Oops – I was obviously so bowled over at PhotoMechanic I forgot his name! UK-based guy, shot for Honda F1? Ring any bells?

Anyway, the speed and ease of use of PM on a day to day basis is amazing. And then you have the extensibility of editing the Export templates as long as you can fudge a bit of Ruby on Rails and HTML. That’s how i built the templates you see in the galleries. Simple, efficient and eminently repeatable. The watermarks, captions, HTML etc are generated on output once you’ve selected your images. Then simply uploaded and linked to my site. I would recommend PhotoMechanic to anyone who takes images on a regular basis. I have no affiliation to them either – I paid full whack for my copy.

Just one final thing, well i guess a repeat of something above, but in other words, there is a copyright statement linked from all the gallery pages, if you’re in doubt about image usage, please check it and try do the right thing.

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