You will find on my flicker page photos from our family Easter celebration today. We had a great time. We enjoy some awesome food. Hunted for Easter eggs. Opened Easter baskets and even flew a kit! We had 14 folks for Easter Brunch. Wow, a lot of people, and I'm pretty sure the grandkids should be counted 3 times. The link to Flickr is below.
Photos - Update to Site
I'm working on "upgrading" how I handle photos on the site. Taking a bit of a queue from how I decided to handle video, I'm going to use Flickr. While YouTube is pretty much the king of video on the net right now, Flickr has been the king of photos since it's creation several years ago. While it's feature set hasn't changed a great deal, it's still the big boy on the street and does what I want it to do. I've had a Flickr account for ages but stop using it when Apple upgraded to MobileMe. While I like how they handle photos, one glaring omission is the inability to embed photos in other places; like my website. Flickr does allow me to do this, and while Flickr has other limitations, it's still pretty slick.
If you look under the Galleries menu you will now see one that says Flickr. From there you can either click and go to my primary Flickr page or you can go down through the menus to categories.
Be advised that I haven't uploaded too many photos in the past year to Flickr so I have some uploading to do to get the site more current.
I did upload some old family photos this weekend, so there is some fresh content available. You can also see how I can embed a slideshow into the website. Like I said, slick.
I will probably also keep some photos on FaceBook. Many of the people I know use FaceBook and I have to admit, it's pretty handy. Especially if you have a modern smart phone.
Old Family Photos
I've posted some of my favorite old photos from the Spore and Foxes archives. These are my favorites, of those I've already scanned. Some highlights are the very first picture of both my father and me. It's wild looking at a photo of your dad wearing one of his first pair of diapers nearly 7 decades ago. Enjoy the photos.
Christmas 2007 Photos Are UP!!!
Don't laugh! I know it only took 5 months, but yes the Christmas photos from 2007 are finally posted. The problem with taking several hundred photos at a time is that the process of culling through them becomes daunting and well, I fell down on the job. Never-the-less they are up now, as well as Easter 2008 and Mother's Day 2008. Plus some other photos as well.
More Photos
Today I added links to both Tracy's .Mac Web Gallery and my .Mac Web Gallery. They are very simple to use and look extreamly pretty. Why .Mac, well, Tracy was already using and as it is part of our whole Apple experience; why not? It plays very friendly with all modern web browsers, works with the iPhone and the Apple TV. I still have my Flickr and Smugmug sites and only time will tell if I make the total switch; but for now it is really easy for me to publish from Aperture and it's just as easy for Tracy to publish from iPhoto.
.Mac isn't state of the art or super fancy, but it fits the need. You can download individual photos or entire albums if you like. There is also the option of adding your own photos to the albums if the feature is turned on for that album. I've not played with that feature much yet.
....................
Tracy's Gallery
.............................................
Kelly's Gallery
Scarborough Renaissance Festival
Tomorrow I will be chaperoning a small gaggle of teenagers on a high school outing to the Scarborough Renaissance Festival here in the Dallas area. It's a pretty standard renaissance festival with jousting, dancing, games, sword fights and of course TURKEY LEGS! While I have been to renaissance festivals in other states I've never been to the one here in Dallas. I've meant to go for years, but never got around to it. Last month my daughter asked if I would like to be a chaperon for the school field trip to Scarborough, and I just had to said yes.
Now admittedly I may be regretting my decision if the gaggle of teenagers drives me a bit insane, but I should be okay handling 6 or 8 teenagers. How much trouble can they get in to with sword fights, jousting and mead around. OH NO!!!
I'm taking my camera and looking forward to all the possibly great photos I might be able to get. That is assuming I have the opportunity and that mother nature doesn't decide to offer Dallas another day of rain, rain and more rain. Shouldn't matter though, in the end I'm sure I will have a great time!
More Photos Available
I've posted more photos to Flickr. They are not recent photos, most are from last year. I've been very bad about doing anything with the photos I take. I get them into Aperture, but fail to do anything with them after that. That has been a bone of contention with my wife as this means she has no access to the photos I take. Since I don't use iPhoto she can pear into my computer and see the photos I have and because of the mass amounts of photos that I do have there isn't an easy way to make them available to her. So I'm exporting the photos and both uploading them to Flickr as well as moving them to her computer.
One of the tricky thing about both Music and Photos is how to share them between members of the same house. iPhoto, for those that use it, does offer a sharing method; but while I love iPhoto, I don't like the destructive way in which it edits photos. If they would move iPhoto to a similar non-destructive format as Aperture and Lightroom i might move back to it.
Never-the-less, you are interested in seeing photos and not my personal workflow. So check out the link below. Next weekend I will work on uploading more photos from 2007 and 2006.
UPDATE 5/6/08 - I've added more photos and will continue to do so over the next several weeks.
Modifying SmugMug
Putting photos on my site is not exactly the easiest thing in the world and since I want to store my favorites on-line anyway I might as well use existing tools. I've tried this in various forms over the past few years and I feel the best way to achieve this is to go back to using SmugMug again. The trick of using SmugMug with my website is getting it to "brand" the same or at least similar to my current website. Because of the tools I use to build my website branding SmugMug the same way has turned out to be a serious challenge.
I have gotten the menu on SmugMug to mimic the functionality of the menu on KellysWorld and maybe in time I will be able to get SmugMug to the point that the only difference between KellysWorld and SmugMug will be the URL. That could be a very large MAYBE.