Dragons byte

Well, I’ve been messing around with various gallery plugins for the site, and I think I have at long last found a winner in Lazyest Gallery. It does (almost) everything I’ve wanted… easy upload dialog, pulling the images from a simple directory so setting up an export in my image organizer should be doable, automatic image resizing, easy adding of descriptions, and more. Still working the kinks out, figuring out what all the options do, and so forth.

The only missing piece is easily adding the images to the post with lightbox enabled as well. That will take some coding, but I think it should be pretty easy to do. I needed to work on the lightbox control anyway because it asks for way too much information – I want to tell it what image I want and have it worry about the details. In the meantime, it’s a little extra work to add an image, but really just a couple copy/paste sequences. I’m off tomorrow, so I’m hoping that I can fix that real soon.

As to the photo – we visited Chinatown in San Francisco, and one of the places mentioned in a guide I’d seen was the fortune cookie factory. It was not at all obvious, down a back alley and we almost walked right past it, but it was interesting to see the cookies being made. We got some ‘naughty’ fortune cookies while we were there, but on the whole they are a little disappointing.

Came back from a trip to San Francisco last week. Took a few pictures that might be worth posting. I added Gallery to the site, and am going to try using that. It certainly makes uploading pictures a lot easier, since I use Digikam (a linux picture organizer) to sort my images, and there is an option to export to Gallery.

Issues to resolve about using Gallery are how to integrate the lightbox preview I’ve already set up – I really like the way it works, so I’ll probably find some way of integrating the two, even if it is only to have the lightbox code use the images that Gallery sets up.

Anyway, Pic#1 from San Francisco bears some resemblance to one I took in Chicago that happens to be in the photos that rotate through the upper right.

Had a friend wondering about the quality of scans when scanning slides with a flatbed scanner. I’ve dug these up out of the archives for a reference.

Slides:
These are the only slides I’ve scanned and I took them in high school, which means that they are about 20 years old. Hopefully my photography has improved since then.

Negatives:

Some black and whites from a roll I shot at a friend’s wedding and developed myself.

Edit:

I’ve been playing with a thumbnail creation script using ImageMagick. It’s pretty cool how much you can do. I had to do some scripting to make it fit the scaling, something that ImageMagick V6 handles with a single extra character, but until that’s running on this server, my solution will work…. long term I want to roll the thumbnail creation into the LightBoxJS stuff. Right now it asks for thumbnail, width and height. No reason it can’t get that stuff automatically.

Further edit:

I’ve update everything to use Lazyest Gallery, so the ImageMagick stuff isn’t needed