I am about to shoot another wedding on Saturday. I am not exactly a professional wedding photographer, but I seem to have a lot of friends who find it a financial blessing for me to give them the gift of my photographic services for a day. So, like previous wedding shoots, I am trying my very best to give them what I would give paying customers, and in the process, hone my professional wedding photography services and skills…just in case somebody does decide to actually pay me one day.
With this wedding, the big service I am adding is posting the photographs online. In the past, since it has just been friends, I have gone the easiest route and just handed them the processed photographs on CDs. I just realized though, that providing online viewing, not only for the couple and their family but also for the guests, is a wonderful service to the couple—it really should be standard in this day and age.
I will tell you a little pet peeve of mine: I get so frustrated with photographer’s websites that are completely flash based. “What is flash?” you say. Well, that is what makes the page really “flashy”: moving items, smooth transitions, and such. That is all great and grand, and helps the photographer present themselves more professionally, but as with any technology, it brings with it some drawbacks. Some customers cannot view flash…I could go into the technicalities of it all, but let’s just keep it simple.
So, all I wanted was a simple, HTML (that is just good, old web page code) web page with the photos for guests to view. Then, I had a beautiful epiphany…
I talk about Picasa, Google’s free photo editing and organizing software, quite often. Well, Picasa can create HTML web pages for me at the click of a button. The pages it creates are simple, but get the job done.
I am going to use Picasa to do the bulk of the work for me (coding all the web pages full of wedding photos), turning a multi-day job into a 30 second job! Admittedly, I am going to adjust a few small things in the code, namely replacing the Picasa logo with my own site’s logo and creating an index page to link to all the individual collections of photos, but that only takes a little bit of time to take care of.
If you want to take a look at what I am talking about, you can keep an eye on the wedding page itself and the pages it links to (which are the Picasa-produced pages). I love simple technology…especially FREE, simple technology.
Interesting though about your web choice. I viewed your pictures and enjoyed them. However being in my location, ie. internet speed, the time frame between each picture took too long for me to personally bear. Of course I didn’t know any of the people except the main couple, so I only enjoyed a few of the more interesting pictures in the larger format.
I had also noticed there was no slideshow button. This seems like an obvious omission to anyone used to viewing pictures online.
One last comment. I tried to download a picture directly into my iphoto program but there was an error. Not sure if it is a Mac thing.
No, there is no automatic slideshow. You can click “next picture” to move through them, but nothing automatic. Those slideshows, by the way, are Flash based, the technology I was specifically trying to avoid. Once the photos are in a Flash video, they are next to impossible for normal people to download and keep. So, I am going with the manual slide show, low-tech solution.
Funny that you could not save the photos. You should be able to just (in Windows clicking behavior) right click and “save image as”. It should be simple.