« Birthday | Main | Ethan Thomas Huffman »

Once more, this time with feeling!

February 17, 2005

First of all, there's a new Summitt in the world and that's just about the coolest thing going right now, so shouts go out to Dave and Julie and Dane. We love you guys and are so happy for you all. Keep those pictures coming!

I know that I promised more frequent blogging in 2005 and so far I haven't delivered much, I know, but I have been pretty busy with redesigning the site, so I hope that makes up for it.

The Gallery is finally online and, while there isn't a ton out there yet, it's a lot more than there was. Anything is greater than nothing, you see. I definitely want to give props to Matt who provided me with the PHP that powers the index page in the gallery and in the Music section, as well. Thanks Matt! Now let's see you get that blog back up and running, eh?

The Gallery section is something that I've been meaning to get around to for such a long time. It feels really good to finally have the framework in place to actually pull it off now with relative ease. And it's that 'relative ease' part that I'd like to share more about.

In the past (when I actually had galleries) I had to do a lot of legwork to prepare images; editing, resizing, formatting and sometimes some scripting and/or HTML coding in order to publish an album of images. It was pre-production, basically. And, in general, pre-production sucks. Bad. Pre-production at such a monotonous level sucks bad.

I realized that I had a ton of things that I wanted to produce and then I calculated how much work it was going to be to prep all those pictures. Everytime I sat down with good intentions, the effort died before it even got started. A dreadful feeling always set in when I even began to think about all the work. I wanted a better way to automate this activity.

At first, I thought that I might create a batch action in Photoshop - automating the process of duplicating an image, then resizing it to a web-friendly size (such as 400x600) and then resizing again as a thumbnail and then moving on to the next image. It's nice that Photoshop can do this, but given the amount of time it would take to do it all, it seemed far too daunting. After all, I have more than 10,000 digital pictures in over 348 separate albums. And since I don't truly want to post each and every one of these albums, let alone every single picture, I'd have had to run that batch on each folder individually, and only then after isolating the images from each album that I wanted to actually post. I'm tired just typing that out, let alone actually doing it. So, procrastination kept winning the battles, but I stayed on the hunt for something to help me solve my problem. And then along came Google and saved the day.

Last July, Google announced that they had purchased Picasa, a photo organizing and sharing tool. The best part of that story was that they were giving the software away. For FREE! And it wasn't your typical freeware, either. It was a sweet program that had tons of great features. But mostly, it helped users get all the images on their computers into one program where you could quickly scan through them, rather than using the clunky Windows folder paradigm which required a lot more clicking and a lot more time. I fell in love immediately.

Then last month, Google released Picasa 2, which added tons more functionality; image editing, direct upload to photo printing websites such as Ofoto, sharing images over an IM (via Hello - also owned by Google, Inc.), web site creation, burning CD's of slideshows & other presentations, backing up photos, importing pics from your digital camera, printing your own pics, etc. Could it possibly do more? I don't think so. There's just nothing it doesn't do.

And it's that "web site creation" feature that finally filled the void for me. That's right, this FREE(!) utility came along and gave me what I had been wanting, nay NEEDING, for several years. Someone please tell me how I can give Google my money. Seriously, I regularly use five of their programs and they won't let me give them any money for their services because they don't charge for any of them.

Now, I'm not naive to think that this romance is going to continue one-sided indefinitely. No, eventually the piper is going to come calling in some form, but frankly, I don't care. I'm willing to pay up. Just show me where to sign.