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a better Picasa web export
Friday, August 17 2007
At some point today I finished culling and labeling my collection of photographs from Scotland, winnowing down the pile from 1500 to a little over 800. In the past I'd used Adobe Photoshop to automate the export of web galleries from massive piles of photos (the sort I generate on these trips), but I've never been especially satisfied with the results. Photoshop, at least up through version 7.0, exported a clumsy and dated style of HTML, completely devoid of style information. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as the HTML generated by Microsoft Word (with its embedded malicious proprietary tags), but it required a lot of work to cajole it into a reasonable design. Also, and it's possible I didn't look hard enough for this feature, there was no provision for captioning the photos. I had to do this after the export, editing each HTML page manually. This was how I put together galleries such as the one for the Iceland trip. So this time I decided to use Picasa to help with the process, partly because it's Gretchen's preferred photo manager (after heavy lobbying for it by her father). Picasa makes it easy to caption photos as one is culling and fixing them, and it also has an HTML export, one that produces a lean, very up-to-date form of HTML. The chief weakness of Picasa's HTML export is its thumbnail index, which is a single page of unformatted thumbnails, sans captions. Since my Scotland collection is more than 800 pictures long, a single thumbnail index would be nearly impossible to use. So today I began work on writing a series of PHP scripts that can automatically scan through the leaf-pages of a Picasa HTML export and generate a nicely-formatted and paginated set of thumbnail index pages on the fly. (By leaf pages, I mean all the pages that are not index pages.) A side benefit of such a scanner is that I could use it to include any additional information I wanted on the index pages, including captions and possibly even precise info about when the photos were taken (derived from the file meta-info stored automatically by the camera itself.) Writing the code for this project was not difficult, as most of the nuts and bolts already existed in the function libraries I'd written to paginate data from MySQL recordsets, parse HTML, and display grids of pictures. Though this will be a fair amount of work, it's an investment for the future. Once I have this system working acceptably I'll be able to use it to flexibly display any export from Picasa. Those interested in the source of this system can download a fully-functional, library-embedded version here.
Doing such intensive web development so soon after getting back from travel (particularly given the dodgy focusing capabilities of my eyes these days) wasn't easy, and when I wasn't taking breaks to putter around in the yard and garden, I'd surf the web for fucked-up things, finding (for example) a particularly gruesome gallery of vintage photographs of executions by beheading. Two of the pictures were snapped after the sword had passed through the neck of the condemned but before the head had fallen an appreciable distance.
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