New Photo Gallery

otternecessities.com now includes a photo gallery.

Yesterday morning I decided that the website needed a gallery, for a couple/few reasons:

• I haven't been keeping it up to date adding new pages for new things like bottles. With a gallery at least there'd be pictures.
• Steampunk events, which we're looking at doing, seem to be more likely to be juried. A gallery allows pictures of things not on the website as per the prior item, as well as pictures of our setup.
• I feel like I can get away with less-than-perfect pictures in a gallery, vs. what I'd want in the main pages of the website.

Dreamhost has Piwigo (still haven't figured out how to pronounce it) gallery software available as a one-click install.  For doing everything else, the documentation is . . . lacking. But I'm reasonably comfortable learning-by-poking, so that was OK.

One thing I definitely wanted was the ability to add to the gallery from my iWhatsit. Initial setup and some customization from the desktop isn't a problem, but I wanted to be able to do routine additions from my iWhatsit. I've found that tasks that require the desktop are just less likely to get done on a timely basis, whereas things that I can do wherever I've got WiFi coverage are more likely to get done.  

Unfortunately, the Piwigo iOs app do sucketh, verily. I couldn't get logged into the gallery the couple times I tried yesterday. Ron got logged in, but then couldn't do anything else. It appears from the app store that something broke in a major way in the last year. OTOH, the standard web interface, once you switch to the HTML uploader (default is Java), is reasonably well-behaved on my tablet. Adding tags has been the only iffy task, and that hasn't been too bad.

I meant to work on Otter Necessities stuff most of yesterday, which did happen, but it ended up being adding pictures to the gallery. I've put up 30-mumble that were on my iPad, and then I went through the pictures on my phone, and Ron went through his iWhatsits, and mailed more pictures to my Otter Necessities account. I've got 33 messages with pictures, so that's probably about 50 more pictures. And I haven't poked to see what we've got on the desktop machine.  Adding pictures would go faster if I didn't add titles, dates (just month/year), and brief descriptions. 

Ron poked at things last night, and switched to a different theme from the default. He also determined that you can associate a picture with more than one album, which could be useful, since one of the albums is "Steampunk", and I can see having things there also in a what-it-is-type album (ie: pouches). 

Related to the posting-from-not-the-desktop-computer thoughts above, I've gotten the process for putting new things up on Etsy from my iWhatsit down. The first few pictures I was using a white chemise as a tablecloth, now I've got a piece of white muslin, which I even ironed. I put the table up in front of the couch, and take the picture facing the couch. Crop, then post on Etsy using the "Etsy Sell" app. I suppose I'd better figure out how to mark the pouches I've been listing on Etsy so they're packed so that they're easy to get to once they go to their first event. Right now they're in a bin on the shelves in the front entry.