I finally took the time to re-build my photo gallery here on ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts. I'd been considering going with something like Gallery2 or Coppermine to do it, but I didn't really want the amount of files that go into those programs cluttering up my server, and the fact that I'd still have to have individual files for all of the images in the gallery didn't help matters either. On the new server, I have a limit of 250,000 files (which is way more than I would probably ever need, but still), so I'm more picky about what I have running on here.
The desire to avoid large photo gallery systems left me pondering how to handle the gallery. Finally, I read an article from one of my favorite design blogs, 24 Ways, that talked about using the web as a CMS. The first thing mentioned in the article is that Flickr can be used to store terabytes worth of photos, and will automatically generate different sizes and allow you to edit them online. While I didn't go on to use the Yahoo Query Language as discussed in the article, I did decide to use the Flickr API for my photo gallery. It took a while to figure out, but I found a tutorial that helped me learn how to properly implement it, and as you can see, it works great and integrates well with my blog.
The next step for this site will be to re-do my portfolio, and then, since all of my gear is finally in one place, I'll take pictures and re-do the "gear" section. Hooray for productivity!
