I've read the posts on photoblogs, honest I have. Cool stuff there. I've come back from living in Kenya for a while and took, of course, piles of pics while I was there. I've narrowed it down, at this point, to about 450 that I'd like to post on my site, both to share with friends and to act as a resource to folks who might be interested in seeing a bit of Kenya, its animals, etc.

In theory, I could pull the actual shot date from iPhoto and past-post them on the actual date they were taken. That's a little too spooky (and disorganized) for my liking. I've split them into categories that make sense. Is there a way I can toy with MT so that I can just post by category, and not by date at all?

Also, is there any way to batch-upload photos into separate "posts" so that I could add captions to make the pics more meaningful? Or, for pics of the same thing, even combine posts to have a single caption? I live how MT works, but I'm tired already at the thought of making 450 individual posts to get them all up. And yes, I really do want to post that many photos.

Thanks for your thoughts.

MT does tend to try and push you into using a date based archiving, but you can archive by category only. I've done just that with my Print Store. You'll find some details here about how I did it. With the proper plug-ins, you can do anything you want with just the category archives, and avoid the date of posting altogether.

As for some kind of batch process, I think you may be out of luck there. The only thing I can think of would be to create a text import file, using the format MT uses when it exports a backup. In essence, you will still be creating 450 individual entries, with all the image tags to go with them, but you'll be doing in via one text file.

I'm not sure that would be any less tedious than making 450 entries via the MT interface. You might find some help if your server has the Perl module ImageMagic installed, as that could eliminate the step of uploading a thumbnail (it creates one for you). Personally, I like to create my own thumbnails, so it wouldn't be any savings.

No matter how you look at it, you're facing what I would estimate as 20 MB of uploaded images (with decent sized enlargements and thumbnails). There's only so much MT can do to help you in that regard. I think your best friend may be that hell known as "editing."

Trust me, I feel your pain.

I think you should examine why you need to use MT for this? There are many galleries out there that support header/footers. I use gallery at reelidentities.org and at snoship.org and have easily made it quite seamless inside my MT sites.

There's a number of php galleries that can take directories and make thumbnail galleries on the fly - so all you have to do is upload the pictures in directories (possibly named after your categories?)

Marginal Hacks (never used it)
http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/album/

Jalbum (looks very good, on-the-fly album creation)
http://www.datadosen.se/jalbum/samples/

Not knocking MT of course, but sometimes it's not worth all the work of getting it to do something it wasn't designed for. Yaknow?

Vincent



Vincent

I'm not sure if this will help, but I used Brandon Fuller's PhotoGallery to implement a photo page on my site.

You basically give it a directory structure to pull from (/photos for example), and it draws up scaled down versions of the images and builds the page via something similar to the following:

I just want to second a recommendation for JAlbum

I use it to manage just a few pictures on my site. I use PHP to switch out the pictures, and MT generates none of the code (well, it generates the header/footer/stylesheet, but they are called by the pages generated by JAlbum with PHP includes). It is a pretty flexible program, and if you are comfortable fooling with templates, you'll figure it out pretty quickly.

Ah, thanks for the link in to JAlbum. Looks like just the thing.

I don't know if you are dead set on using MT as a photo album, but Coppermine is supposed to work wonders...

http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/

- Matt (2)

Agreed. I use Coppermine myself, and was highly disappointed when I decided I would try Gallery instead of it. Within a hour, I had reinstalled Coppermine and was grumbling about the four hundred pictures that I had to re-upload. Grr.

I have used both MT and Coppermine for photoalbum uses. MT kicks butt, in the sense that you can customize it exactly to how you want it, whereas Coppermine is a simple ... well, photo gallery. There are skins you can use to change the appearance, but it isn't as easily modified as MT.

Here's Coppermine in use, if you want to see:
http://www.haloandhorns.com/f16/
(Excuse the fact that I only have one picture uploaded at the moment. I was still kicking myself rather brutally about trying to switch to Gallery).

I've also run into the need to post a large amount of photos into MT, and didn't want to have to upload each individual one. The MT import work great, but you still need to create each individual post, which I didn't want to have to do.

To over come that, I created a script (and posted on my blog) that would pull the information that I needed from the photos.

I use the photo blog that is shown at Quixotic Pixels

If you have any questions on the script, I'll be happy to take a look for you.

I have a tutorial for a PHP image gallery that I use in conjunction with MT.

Check it out at http://www.red-team-go.net/joh/stuff/index.php