My new digital photography site is up!
My new digital photography site is up and running! Check it out:
Digital Photography: Digital Field Guide
The companion blog, Photoblog 2.0.
Note: the Googleplex Blog has not been forgotten (although my postings have been a little slimmer the last few days as I've struggled to get the new site up!). Photoblog 2.0. will be for my photographs, and for issues related to digital media and technology.
Officially, Digital Photography: Digital Field Guide is the companion Website for a book to be published by John Wiley (with the eponymous title). However, the site has taken on a life of its own.
It's great to have an attractive venue to display my digital photographs. I've also enjoyed the technical aspects of putting together the site. I decided to use a Flickr account to manage my photographs. Flickr does a great job of organizing the photos, tagging them, and creating a digital photo community.
The privacy settings make it easy for me to have public pictures, which appear on Digital Photography: Digital Field Guide, and also to maintain private photo galleries for friends and family.
The Flickr site is built around syndication, and every set of photographs you can imagine can be syndicated. Flickr does a less good job of archival management for me: the format is limited to Jpeg so I can't store the original RAW format "negatives" using Flickr.
A really cool Flickr feature: you can blog a photo right from Flickr! This makes it easy for me to upload new pictures straight from my camera and blog them with one pass!
Flickr supplies "badges" either in HTML or Flash that one can post on one's own site (either of one's one pictures, or of public Flickr photos generally). These badges are cool, but a little limited from a formatting perspective (and likely you'll want to fool with the code a little to match your site graphics). I used these to some degree on my site, but where I really had fun was with the Flickr API, which expose a great deal of flickr's functionality.
Since my site is written in PHP, I used (and modified) OberKampf, a PHP wrapper library for the API written in PHP. A great deal of fun, shows my photographs off to great advantage, and makes many photo management chores very easy for me.
My flickr wishlist (bearing in mind that Flickr is the cat's pajamas): ability to archive RAW formats, "primitive" functions that allow image effects such as rollovers, fades, dissolves -- both as part of "badges" and in the Flickr API.
Posted by Harold Davis at May 11, 2005 11:43 AM
