You have a bunch of photo’s and they are stored on your hard-drive or maybe you are still using the old-fashioned way of storing your negatives and photos in a large cabinet where they are collecting dust or even worse, eaten by time.
And even worse, every time you want to show off to your friends your dust allergy sticks his head up and you will be sneezing all over your valuable work.
So what to do? I don’t know what you should do, but I can tell what I have done. I bought a film-scanner and started to scan my old negatives. By doing so I am sure that I have a back-up of my work and that I will make my life a lot easier when I want to work with my photos or when I want to show them to other people. Plus at the moment we do not have the space to build a darkroom so developing my photos is a no-go anyway.
In the beginning I started with scanning my negatives and processed them in Adobe Photoshop. Hell of a job and after 50 rolls of film you start to dislike the whole process. Of course I had my share of digital photos already on my HD, so my digital collections started to grow. When I had a substantial amount I created a website and started to upload my work. For every picture I uploaded I had to adjust my HTML code. Again not a very nice job.
Then I got introduced to Gallery2, a PHP, open source (so free), already build web gallery. I loved it. And I started to upload my photos. There I made the first mistake. I uploaded everything that I got. Forgetting one of the first lessons I had learned on school. Don’t show all, only show the best!. You can still see this gallery here. It was slow, and way too much. In the meanwhile I was introduced to WordPress, an open source blog. And I started to use that for several of my sites. Easy to set up and very easy to maintain.
In the meanwhile some smart guys had build a plugin for WordPress, which made it possible to combine WordPress and Gallery2. WPG2 is its name and it works like a charm, you upload you photos to Gallery2, and you use them, in combination with text, in WordPress. And when the visitor clicks on the small photo he is being re-directed to you gallery.
So sounds easy, doesn’t it? You need to realise that you will need some web-space to publish a website. This can be hosted from your home or by a hosting provider like Servage.net. I am not going to tell you how you should arrange that, there are plenty of articles available on the net the can show you how to get your own space.
I do you that the link in this article will help you on your way. And feel free to post any comments or questions.
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