New Photo Galleries
Awhile back I decided that I wasn't totally happy with Gallery2. It has a lot of great features but its just a bit to slow for my taste with the way it has to access the database for everything.
I heard about the Flickr API maybe 6 months ago or so, it sounded like a very interesting idea. I already kept a lot of my photos there and it would allow me the ability to dynamically get photos from flickr and display it on my own website. I looked into phpFlicker and found it pretty easy to get going with it. After a few months of tweaking it and making some custom views on the photos I have updated my website to view photos in this way.
When you initially view a gallery it shows the small square thumbnails to the left and a large view of a photo on the right which changes accorded to the thumbnail last hovered on. The images are pre-loading as soon as the page is viewed so the mouse-over should work relatively quickly. If you click on either the thumbnail or the large photo view it goes to the single photo view. Here you can go next and previous and all that. If you just click on the photo it goes to the next photo unless it is the last photo in the set it jumps back up to the entire set view. There is an opportunity to contact me about any particular photo by using the contact link at the bottom. This takes you to the contact page with that particular photo automatically included in the message I receive so I can respond to any questions about it easily.
I'v had several people beta test the new design and see how it works on several browsers since it uses heavy service side scripting and some unusual CSS stuff especially in the photo viewer . I've had positive responses so far. I feel like flickr is a service that can be relied on even though it is still beta. I access flickr daily and have only experienced very minor interruptions, less than most sites I visit. Thanks to everyone for the help in beta testing.