Photo Portfolio Site Redone

Over the past little bit I’ve let one of my web sites dwindle down as I found it not as fun update. You see, with the previous incarnation of my photography portfolio website (www.tyleringramphotos.com) it was running on WordPress. I have had a few iterations with themes but essentially each blog post was a new photo. I began to dislike the way that worked and thought through some new ways of displaying photos, but making it a less time consuming experience to maintain.

As many of you know (or if you don’t, you will now), I use Flickr a lot to showcase, display and share photos with people. With having a Pro Account on Flickr, the ability to upload an unlimited amount of photos is a great thing. Another aspect I like about storing photos on Flickr, is that it saves my web hosting packages from using up bandwidth when displaying photos to visitors. Flickr rarely (or never) goes down, so the photos are essentially available 24/7.

So what does Flickr have to do with my new photo portfolio website? A lot actually. In fact, the way I redesigned the new website is to utilize the Flickr API (Application Programming Interface) in such a way that to update my photos on my portfolio site, all I have to do is add them to Flickr in the appropriate location.

Using the magical powers of PHP in conjunction with Flickr’s API allows me to easily display and showcase photos that I find might be worthy of showing my photographic talents.

So how does this all work?

First I set up a Collection in Flickr. A Collection is pretty much a larger scope of photos which typically content multiple Sets. In my case, I created a collection called Portfolio which is comprised of multiple Sets. Each Set is of a particular theme; Sports, Travel, Wildlife, People and HDR (or High Dynamic Range). All I have to do to add a photo to a particular location is to add it to a particular Set.

Being my biggest critic, I still hum and haw over photos that I think might be worthy enough to show people my skills behind the camera.

Once all the photos I wanted to show on the site were in their respected Flickr Sets, it was time to figure out how I want to display them and dive deeper into the Flickr API.

The front page (shown at the top of this post) will randomly select 12 photos from each Set to display. You can browse the sets one by one, or you can click on a photo within the set to display that photo right away. Cool right?

When you click on a particular Set, it will display all the photos that belong to that Set as Thumbnails first. It will also give a brief description about the particular Set too.

When you click on a particular photo it will display it on the page in all its beautiful glory! Typically shown at 800 pixels on the long edge. It will retrieve the photo’s Title and Description and display it.

You also might notice a small, white Question Mark at the top right corner of each photo as well. When you click on it, it will slide out and display some more information about the photo itself, usually the EXIF data as well as its keywords. All this information is retrieved from Flickr.

You can also navigate between photos by clicking on the arrows at the top of each photo. Hopefully this makes it a bit easier to look through the photos. The page load times shouldn’t be that bad either as all it does is fetches the photos as they are being displayed. I might look perhaps a more easier to use AJAX system which will not require page loads, though for now I think it works nicely.

There is also a Photo of the Day (PotD) page for my portfolio site. This page works similarly to the rest of the site. Photos are added to the Flickr Set I can created for this particular feature. Any photos that I think are interesting, and other people might find interesting will be added to the Photo of the Day section. Again, being able to just add it to the Flickr Set, makes this an easy section to update.

The About and Contact pages are fairly static and nothing really exciting. The Contact page has a form that people can fill out to get in touch with me, it is also generated via PHP and does some nice massaging magic for when I receive the messages.

Another cool thing to make mention about the way I created this website is the use of a singal configuration file. With that configuration file, I could change the photos shown by just changing a view variables. I could display a Flickr Collection that you, yourself have set up and it will display any photos you have within the sets within that Collection of yours. Who knows, perhaps other people might like something similar to this right? Perhaps I can one day include theme support? Ah, the possibilities could be endless!

Possible Future Updates:

I am always thinking of new ways to not only share and display my photography, but also to make my websites a bit more interesting and exciting. Some other ideas I have for the site but will need some more thought are:

• Purchasing of Photos with a Shopping Cart
• Easier way to navigate between Photos – Perhaps AJAX based
• More Photos!

What do you think of this particular newly redesign photography portfolio website? What do you like/dislike about it? What would you like to see on it? I am always wanting feedback about the work I do in both the Photography department and the Web Design/Developing department, so I hope you will leave a comment with your thoughts/suggestions!