So my Dad, bless his soul, is about as anti-digital as one can get when it comes to photography…. well I guess I could extend that to pretty much anything else digital as well, including computers. So the likelihood of him even reading this is slim at best.

The other day he accidentily left his top loading automatic fuji film camera on the top of his car as he drove off… and guess what, it became destroyed after another passing motorist took aim for his now shuttering camera lying in the middle of the road. My father will tell you it was a premeditated act done by a soul-less individual.

I do have to admit however, that even for a point and shoot camera, I think the results he was getting from that little camera were quite good. The one thing that really stood out for me was the colour was always spot-on. The focus decent when printed at 4×6 size. The review window on the back of the camera, non-existent.

With the price of a decent point and shoot dropping like a rock you would think that this would be the perfect opportunity to change formats, but this is my dad we’re talking about. A couple days later he calls me up, full of excitement, to tell me about his new purchase, er, I mean, purchases. You see, he started looking for a replacement “film” camera at a couple of the local pawn shops but had no luck. So while driving pass a thrift shop he thought he should check it out.

They had three “film” cameras, and after some heavy duty negotiating he walked out of there with $7.50 less in his wallet…. Why three, cause you never know if a serial “film” camera killer might be in the area.

The next day he was in Port Huron just looking around, doing some cross border shopping, when he ended up in another pawn shop, and unbelievably enough, they too had a “film” type camera. So he bought that too! Again, if the killer strikes again, what are the chances he’ll take out all 4 cameras. I guess pretty good if he leaves all 4 cameras on top of his car!

So in the end, is it so wrong to still be in a dying format, I wonder if the camera killer also works for the film companies who are no longer going to make film. Admittedly, for me, the results from film, even on a point and shoot, still produces a quality image… and if he’s happy with it, why not. I know that in my case, my recently purchased canon “L” glass could have bought roughly 500 of his thrift shop cameras. If I ever leave that on the roof of my car, well I shutter (insert groan here) at the thought.

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Wow, what a long title huh!? Anyway, I really, really, really like the WP-Simpleviewer plugin and have used Simpleviewer as a stand-alone application, so it was only natural that I would want to use it as part of this, my wordpress weblog for my photography website. The only problem I ran into, and I’d consider this to be a major one, was the image quality was very poor and I found that any of my images that had text in them in particular would render very poorly…and when you’re trying to promote yourself as a photographer, potential clients don’t want to see crap.

So, anyone else that stumbles across this and is looking for the solution, well it may not be what you want to hear, but this will give you the best quality image. For the most part, this solution is found here at the developers site click here for the RSS feed I subscribed to for more info.

In a nutshell, a mod that had an effect on quality, but for me, not enough was to change the change the code in wp-simpleviewer-admin.php in line 1183 from imagecopyresized to imagecopyresampled. In the end, my best quality results are accomplished by following these directions.

Really, the only thing I’m offering here is a workflow that helps me, especially since I had 7 galleries to convert back to a more decent offering of images. Basically, when you run the WP-simpleviewer plugin it creates a thumbnail folder (tn) and a picture folder (reg), which incidentally is where the generated images go.

1. So in my case I use my origional files on my laptop for the gallery I want to improve and place just those images in a temporary folder and use the Automate feature in Photoshop to create a web photo gallery, setting my image quality to 8 and image size to 450 pixels.
2. Once the gallery is created I go to the images folder of my newly created webgallery using an FTP program and transfer the photoshop created images into the ‘reg’ folder of the gallery that I’m trying to improve the quality of. I agree to replacing the old images with the new, go back to my weblog page, hold the ’shift’ key with the refresh selection (Internet Explorer) to clear out the cache and test my gallery…. if everything was done correctly, you should notice a distinct difference between your old images from your new.
3. After I’ve verified everything is working for that particular gallery, I go to the temporary directory I created to store the images from the gallery I wanted to create a gallery photo page from via photoshop and simply delete all those images. I then go to the other temporary web directory I used for photoshops destination folder and delete all the content out of there.
4. Now I’m ready to complete the whole process all over again. The nice thing about this process is that the Automate feature will now use my newly created default directories and I don’t have to go searching for the directory I want to recreate.

As an example of my folder naming structure this is what I use:

My gallery source folder on my laptop: galleryTemp

My gallery destination folder on my laptop: webTemp

Good luck to ya if you’re into using this gallery. Esthetically this is one of the best looking galleries, especially when your into clean and simple, and lightweight is great as well.

Rob

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This is my web log area, also known as a blog, hence the name of the tab you clicked on to get here. Anyway, since I haven’t been keeping a blog this is my first foray into one, and as such, every blog needs it’s first post regardless of how mundane. So please check back or subscribe to my RSS feed to get automatically notified when a new article is posted. Thanks for visiting. Rob

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