API

My brother had a baby last april and he shortly moved out of the country, so getting images to all the family was obviously a top priority.

I have been thinking about how over documented our lives are going to be now. When she is 18, there will be tens of thousands of pictures from birth on up. Movies of every important time in her life etc. Organizing the images will be better too. Now, when I want to see images of my child hood, I have to look through drawers and albums to maybe find something. Now, you just launch an application and you can find the image in a few seconds. And with storage being so cheep now, no one every thinks twice before taking that 200nd picture of the same thing.

So back to my brother. He setup a photo gallery using gallery2 and sent a link to everyone. gallery2 may be powerful, but none of the elder family members can begin to use it. Honestly I had a problem with it as well. So I started thinking, can I do something about this? So now I had a reason to play with the flickr API. I put together a simple as can be photo gallery the other night suing the flickr API and PHPflickr (a php class for dealing with the flickr images). You can see the site here. This is just a test using my images, but it works with private images, so no one on flickr can see them, and you could just simply password protect the site to keep your privacy.

The site uses some nice javascript, and all the albums are requested using ajax. I figured, not moving the page eases the navigation for people. By not jumping to a new page when you view an image, you wont lose your place if you are viewing a lot of pics and had scrolled down. Same with the albums (if there where a lot of them it would scroll right/ left).

Anyways, there is a lot of stuff i want to try with this, I just need the time.