Finally, after much speculation and anticipation (by whom, I don’t know), I have released jdhunt.net :: photos. The actual pictures are still stored on Flickr, but now visitors to this site can view all of the pictures without ever having to leave this domain. Despite your obvious enthusiasm, it isn’t that big of a deal, but I do like being able to display the pictures here without pointing to another site, although the ability to view my Flickr photostream is certainly still there. So, for those interested, here is a little bit of technical info on what I did.
The actual pictures are stored on Flickr, and data about my photosets and photos are retrieved by the Flickr API. To save myself the headache of packaging the xml requests and responses, I used the FlickrNet .NET library by Sam Judson. The library provided every available Flickr web method call that I needed, and is recommended for anyone who wants to write any .NET-enabled Flickr applications. FlickrNet may not provided every feature that is needed by some applications, but for my needs it was excellent. To display the actual picture in the browser, I used Slimbox, which is a lightweight version of the popular Lightbox photo displaying Javascript utility. Everything else was simply ASP.net 2.0 coding. Once I got started with FlickrNet, it didn’t take very long at all to get the code banged out and tested.
This is the first release of the photo gallery, and most certainly will not be the last. I already know of a few improvements I would like to make, and may even have a new release within a week. For one, I would like to provide a way to display the pictures without the browser having to contact Flickr (aka: proxy). I know that my mom’s place of employment blocks Flickr, so I would like to give her a way to view my pictures and download some for her desktop wallpaper. She’s biased, she thinks some of my pictures are actually decent. In actuality, I do have a way to do this working on my computer at home, I just need to tie in some loose ends to complete this feature. Another improvement I may or may not make for a future release involves the paging of photos and photosets. I used a basic Repeater and PagedDataSource to display both photos and photosets. For the first release I simply made the paging available through the use of postbacks. I am considering the use of AJAX for the paging of the photos and photosets once I get my hands around ASP.net AJAX. I am still weighing whether or not this will help the user experience when viewing a larger photoset or search results, so I may keep paging the way it is currently.
A bigger future release of the photo gallery depends wholly on Flickr – collections. As I stated in a previous post, Flickr released a feature called collections, which is a way to collect photosets within their own categories (ie: sets of sets). The collections are not yet accessible via the API, so any plans I have with collections will have to wait until Flickr proceeds with the API. I do not anticipate a lot of difficulty on this end once the API is released.
I have to admit that developing the photo gallery was an enjoyable exercise. Although the gallery I rolled myself last fall was decent (in my mind), I really do prefer the flexibility that Flickr offers. And the use of the API was a pleasure! Actually, the public API was a large reason for my choosing of Flickr over continuing to develop my own photo gallery. I knew that I could display the picture on this site easily, while enjoying the good tools and community that Flickr fosters.