a photo viewer idea

[Josef Lowder]

.
For several years, I have been trying to figure out an
efficient way to organize, manage, display, and share with 
family and friends some of the thousands of photos I have 
accumulated.  Finally, I've figured out something that I 
thought might be of interest to others. 

See a small sample here:  http://upquick.com/funnypix

In this small example, it takes only 380K of file space 
to display the example 12 photos and there is no wasted 
space in the display, no ads, no clutter, and it takes 
only a few seconds to prepare a display like this sample 
(an only a very few minutes to prepare a huge display of 
hundreds of photos). 

Two small shell scripts do the job:  'mkall300' and 
'makephotoviewer'.  These two could be combined, but 
there are some advantages in keeping them separate. 

If anyone is interested, I'd be glad to share these scripts. 


--------------------------------------------
FWIW:  a few thoughts about photo file sizes: 

One of the things I am discovering and realizing is that I have 
been collecting and saving digital photos at waaaay too large of 
a file size for each photo.  While it's great to have "high-res" 
two and three-megapixel images for printing the very limited 
number of photos that one may actually want to print, it is just 
not practical (imho) to try to save, view, and share thousands of 
photos at huge file sizes. 

For the most part a 100,000 byte (or even smaller) photo is 
really about all that is practical to try to view on a web page. 
Even half or one-third that size is generally a very adequate 
size for viewing on a computer.  Images that size load and 
display 10, 20, or 30 times faster than one and two megapixel 
photos, so one can view a lot more very satisfactory resolution 
photos much faster than large file-size photos. 

Finally, I have figured out how to mass-resize large batches of 
photos and upload them very quickly and efficiently so they should 
be fast and easy to view online.