Photo Flow: Getting the Pictures from Camera to Web

David Weinberger wrote about his own solution to getting pictures out of his camera and up on the web (he wrote a Visual Basic script to let him “one click publish”).

After reading that, I realized that I needed a place for my own photos from the convention to live. Thanks to the good graces of my landlords, I used the silverorange <a href=http://labs.silverorange.com/a/photogallery”>Photo Gallery System to post photos from the New Hampshire Primary back in January; while their system is, as advertised, “powerful and easy-to-manage,” I found the process of uploading photos without a desktop component quite cumbersome.

Conversely, using Apple’s iPhoto and publishing photos to my dotMac account is really, really easy. But the resulting galleries are, to my eye, ugly. And there’s not a lot of flexibility with format and design.

So last night I installed Gallery, a photo gallery system for PHP, on the server (I had tried Exhibit Engine earlier in the night, but it requires an FTP server, and I wasn’t keen on that).

Gallery installed in a snap. It’s a little confusing to configure, mostly because there are so many options that your mind gets dizzy. But it’s all very “wizardy,” and if you follow all the instructions, it’s about 30 minutes from download to done.

The result is photos.reinvented.net and, for current purposes, the 2004 U.S. Election Album therein.

The neato thing about Gallery is that it has a companion client application, Gallery Remote, that runs under Mac OS X (as well as myriad other systems), and you can drag-and-drop photos from iPhoto into Gallery Remote, add a caption, and — blamo! — upload them to the web.

I’ve already posted my New Hampshire Primary photos and some photos from Super Tuesday in San Francisco. All of my photos from the DNC will end up in this DNC Album.