Work is well underway on experimenting with different gallery styles with Photocrati. The home screen is preety much ready and will simply be a running slideshow of some showcase images, though right now it’s simply cycling through three I had randomly picked for testing. I’ve decided on simply having the images displayed, with no comments, on the basis the I don’t want to clutter the screen and detract from the images.

The galleries are the biggest challenge. After looking around at various web sites I’ve decided on the the sizes I’ll use; 1200px wide for landscape format and 900px high for portrait format. I think that most modern displays should be able to cope, though I do know that some of my more verbose comments may cause issues.

At the moment the galleries are in thumbnail format, but I do like the whole lightbox look.

One annoying thing is that Photocrati doesn’t appear to be very flexible on the IPTC fields it makes use of and, at least by default, makes use of the Headline and Caption-Abstract fields. Annoying in that the other display apps I use (for things like the iPad) don’t use the Headline field, but rather the ObjectName field. That’s nearly three thousand photos I’ll need to change…

So, things are moving along and I’m still hoping to make the self-imposed end-of-Jannuary public unveiling 🙂

I’ve decided to give Photocrati a try; they offer a thirty day money-back guarantee so the clock is ticking for me to configure a basic web site to see if all works as I want.

The biggest pain is going to be resizing my images to 960px/limiting the image size to less than 2MB, the maximum size that Photocrati appears to accept. There is an auto-resize 0n upload option but I wasn’t having much joy with that. Some of the photo album resizing can be automated but a lot will need manual intervention.

The site will appear and disapper over the next month as I try out various options.

I seem to be stuck right now in deciding between the Photocrati plugin or moving over to Smugmug for hosting. Until I can make a decision on which way to go I can’t really begin to design the site. It’s all a bit daunting really; printing off a few photographs to show friends and family is wonderfully simple, but designing a web site to show your work to the World at large is no small task.

So my goal is to decide upon either Photocrati or Smugmug by the end of 2012. Then I can finally design the site…

The site is alive but nothing is configured as yet. Please stop by again from time-to-time for urban, landscape and travel photography.