MichaelEdenfield

Recently, I overhauled the browsing interface for photos at http://www.islandpacket.com

A new format we're trying out uses the galleriffic plugin for jquery and looks like this:

You can see a working example here - http://www.islandpacket.com/photos

Previously, our photo template displayed photo galleries by default in a list format, which doesn't lend itself well to discovery. It's also a frustrating way to view many photos. Here's a small thumbnail of what I'm talking about:

So now that we have this new photo browsing interface, I had to create a portal page to help users discover the various photo sections that will each feature many photos flowing through. This page uses several database queries to return the amount of photos a given gallery has, the time the gallery was last updated, and displays a preview of the latest image. This query process is all automated using Perl template toolkit queries and server side includes.

Currently, this portal example is at http://www.islandpacket.com/1398 but will soon move to http://www.islandpacket.com/photos as the main landing page for photography. The portal page looks like this:

Also, I developed a photo discovery widget for the islandpacket.com home page based on a photoshop wireframe designed in house. The discovery widget uses jQuery tabs UI to display 4 different photo categories and dynamically pull in the latest three photos using server side includes of custom template toolkit output. Within the template toolkit output, I auto-wrapped each photo with it's corresponding link in the full-size photo gallery so that one can view additional photos without ending their browsing experience or hitting back on their browser.

The widget looks like this:

There are a few more loose ends to be tied up on the photo gallery, but all in all I think it's a tremendous improvement over photographic display and discovery on islandpacket.com, which again was just a simple list.