Still Not Perfect

I’ve been trying Pictorialis II out as a photo gallery. You can see the results of my experiment here (example taken offline - it was getting spammed to death and I’m not using it anyway). For the most part I am pleased with it, but I’ve got a couple gripes:

1. Doesn’t produce valid XHTML - Although Pictorialis II is based on Wordpress, the author doesn’t seem to take the XHTML standard (or just plain HTML for that matter) very seriously. Not a huge deal because every browser I’ve tested has rendered the invalid code the same way, but you can’t count on that if the code isn’t valid according to the W3 standards. It sure would have been nice if the Pictorialis pages had validated as soon as I installed them and got a couple of photos posted. I’ll be working on fixing the non-standard code, or in some cases blantantly missing tags in the near future (as time permits).
2. Produces grainy and sharp thumbnails - It seems almost everyone who does a PHP image uploader with image resizing for thumbnails has been using the imagecopyresized() function to do the resize for thumbnails instead of imagecopyresampled(). Sure imagecopyresized() works fine, and is nice and fast, but the output just isn’t very nice. Your thumbnails turn out grainy and pixellated. Warning: completely uneducated guess at how imagecopyresized() and imagecopyresampled() work coming up.
        When imagecopyresized() resizes an image it doesn’t resample the image. What this means is that if you want to resize your image to 50% of its original size imagecopyresized() will basically take the pixel it finds at every other position and stick it directly into the new file. This causes sharp edges and the pixellated look because it doesn’t take into account the pixels in between the ones it moved into the new file. You effectively lose valuable image information. If you want nice clear thumbnails that maintain much of the clarity of the original you want to resample the image as you resize it. Resampling will average the colors found in the pixel it would move to the new image using the imagecopyresized() method with the colors found in the pixels surrounding that pixel. This causes the result to appear much smoother, almost as good as if you had done the thumbnail in Photoshop. This may be an over-simplification of course (I haven’t looked at the source code for imagecopyresized() or imagecopyresampled()).
        One limitation imagecopyresampled() has is that it must work with true color images because the averages of pixel colors don’t usually fit in the regular image 255 color palette. Luckily Pictorialis II was already resizing with a true color image so I simply changed the function call from imagecopyresized() to imagecopyresampled(). The imagecopyresampled() method is also a bit slower, but as long as you are creating static files with it, not serving images on the fly, you should be alright. In my opinion the difference in output is more than worth it.
3. No tight integration with an existing Wordpress blog - Obviously I have an existing Wordpress blog. I would have liked to have easy tie-ins from Pictorialis to Wordpress such as posting an entry to the blog when a new album is created and ability to place my Wordpress header, links, menus on the photo gallery pages. I made a quick attempt at the latter, and ended up with some funny results. Pictorialis has its own set of categories and links (that don’t display in the default install) and over-rode the Wordpress ones. I’m sure there is a way around it, but it won’t be as simple as just putting my menu and links code into the Pictorialis template. Of course I could simply write a bit of code to create a new post on my blog when a new album is created too.

There are of course lots of good things about Pictorialis II as well:

1. It uses the familiar Wordpress interface - This interface is one of the reasons I chose Wordpress for this site. It’s simple and pretty logically laid-out. Pictorialis’ interface doesn’t behave exactly the same, but it has the same flavor so it’s a pretty easy transition.
2. Easy and fast install - The install took all of about 3 minutes. Now of course I had to tweak things for a couple of days to get things where I thought they were presentable, but those were mostly aesthetic changes.
3. Pretty nice bulk photo upload - I’m pretty pleased with the bulk photo upload feature. It isn’t exactly bulk upload, actually. It is more like bulk photo processing from a directory already on the server. You can upload images from your browser to albums, but only one at a time. However, if you upload a bunch of images to a directory on the server you can create a new album and just tell Pictorialis to put all of the photos in that directory into the album. It will make all of the thumbnails and everything for you. The only thing you have to do is go through the album and name the photos (unless you really want them all named by their file names).
4. Consistent with blog concepts - I like how Pictorialis is more than just a simple photo gallery. It allows comments and feedback to be posted on your images. This could be extremely valuable for all the artsy photographers out there. It is always good to get constructive feedback about your work. As you can tell from the photos in my gallery I’m not one of those good photographers. I’m using mine more as a family photo album. But hopefully the family will like to leave comments and make fun of some of the funny faces.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2004 at 10/31/2004 3:31 am and is filed under Computing, Wordpress.