UFO Series Home Page -- photo gallery update!

Hi all,

Before I get anyone's hopes up, I have NOT added any new photos to my website. :-)

However, I have just done a major update of all the photo pages -- all of the photos
which were previously on the "new photos" page are now in their appropriate section.
Also, I've updated the pages to the newer website "look", and now all of
the pages use a photo gallery / thumbnail interface. Also, the galleries now
adjust themselves to your browser's window size -- previously the only option
was to have 3 columns, but now if your monitor has lots of resolution, you can
have 4, 5, 6, etc. columns.

Photo captions are now viewable by holding your mouse over a photo (at least, this
works on my computer in both IE and Firefox).

Also, the categories "Straker and Foster Photos" and "More Character Photos" have
been merged into just "Character Photos". So there are now 4 pages total:

- New Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/new.html
- Character Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/character.html
- Hardware Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/hardware.html
- Behind-the-Scenes Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/behindTheScenes.html

This seems like a good way to categorize the photos, although if someone has
a better idea please let me know. These categories are still imperfect, for
example...

...is this photo of Col. Lake a "Character" photo, or is it a "Behind the Scenes"
photo?

http://ufoseries.com/photos/btsWandaTimelashOutfit.jpg

...is this photo of Col. Lake by Foster's car a "Hardware" photo or a "Character"
photo?

http://ufoseries.com/photos/fostersCarWanda.jpg

...and this photo of the SHADO HQ parking lot seems not to belong to any of
these categories:

http://ufoseries.com/photos/identCarpark.jpg

Oh well, I guess the only perfect separation would be something like
"color" photos and "black and white" photos... or maybe "live action"
and "special effects" photos...

One change that is probably not so obvious to website visitors is that
these new pages will be much easier for me to change or add new photos
to, so hopefully this will result in lots of new photos in the future...

Marc

Oh, one more thing...

Now that the galleries have been updated, the next task would be to
add some new photos. The only question I have is what is your
preferred resolution for new photos? The photos I did 10 years
ago were 640 x 480 pixels. The photos I did last year were
1024 x 768 pixels. Is there any reason to increase that? Keep
in mind that increased resolution means larger file sizes and
longer download times.

These days, web browsers automatically scale photos down to the
window size, so I see no reason for offering multiple
resolutions as I have in the past.

Marc

---Hi, Marc! Personally I see no reason to go beyond the "1024 X
768"! About the ONLY reason I can think that it might be
advantageous to do so would be if You were doing a "DTV"
transmission... Leo  

In [hidden email], "Marc Martin" <marc@...> wrote:

> Hi, Marc! Personally I see no reason to go beyond the "1024 X
> 768"! About the ONLY reason I can think that it might be
> advantageous to do so would be if You were doing a "DTV"
> transmission...

I agree that for casual web viewing, 1024 x 768 pixels is probably
good enough. The people who request more than that probably want
to make their own 8 x 10" prints -- and possibly then sell them
on eBay!

Also, the copyright owners might be more inclined to shut the
website down if I put up images that are TOO high in
resolution... (?)

Marc

--- Hi, again, Marc! That sounds like a very "logical" conclusion
(or assumption)! Leo

In [hidden email], "Marc Martin" <marc@...> wrote:

--- In [hidden email], "Marc Martin" <marc@...> wrote:
COOOOOLLLLL!!!!! Good job, Marc!
>

Hello!
Marc, thanks for everything you are doing!
As long as I am concerned, the bigger, the better... (Only if it doesn't mean a danger of shutting down the page)
Thanks again and all the best!
Branko

To: [hidden email]
From: [hidden email]
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 14:08:15 -0700
Subject: Re: [SHADO] Re: UFO Series Home Page -- photo gallery update!




















> Hi, Marc! Personally I see no reason to go beyond the "1024 X

> 768"! About the ONLY reason I can think that it might be

> advantageous to do so would be if You were doing a "DTV"

> transmission...



I agree that for casual web viewing, 1024 x 768 pixels is probably

good enough. The people who request more than that probably want

to make their own 8 x 10" prints -- and possibly then sell them

on eBay!



Also, the copyright owners might be more inclined to shut the

website down if I put up images that are TOO high in

resolution... (?)



Marc






















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Discover the new Windows Vista
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hi Marc,

Looks pretty good to me. Did you use software for this or brute force?

For batch adding of photo effects like watermarking, text addition, file
renaming, re-sizing or framing (drop shadows, borders) I can highly
recommend

http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

It's free (well, actually I sent in a donation since I liked it so
much), I've been using it for a while. It takes a lot of the work out of
batch processing and has worked flawlessly so far.

Paul



Marc Martin wrote:

> Looks pretty good to me. Did you use software for this or brute force?

I've used software photo gallery makers for other things, but for some
reason I wanted to keep these galleries done manually (I even redid all
of the thumbnails one-by-one manually!)

If you look at the HTML code for the galleries, you might be how surprised
at how simple I was able to make the code. This is great news for me,
because it will be much easier to maintain -- added, deleting, or
reordering photos is now trivial from an HTML standpoint!

Marc

Hi Mark:

Your site has always been the premier?place to go for info on UFO.? Let me tell you....you did a fantastic job with the photo pages.? They load quickly and look larger and clearer then before.??I?appreciate all your hard work as I am sure all the other?members will concur.? "The Commander" would certainly?want a man like you at SHADO.

LoWiz

-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Martin <[hidden email]>
To: [hidden email]
Sent: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 3:18 pm
Subject: [SHADO] UFO Series Home Page -- photo gallery update!






Hi all,

Before I get anyone's hopes up, I have NOT added any new photos to my website. :-)

However, I have just done a major update of all the photo pages -- all of the photos
which were previously on the "new photos" page are now in their appropriate section.
Also, I've updated the pages to the newer website "look", and now all of
the pages use a photo gallery / thumbnail interface. Also, the galleries now
adjust themselves to your browser's window size -- previously the only option
was to have 3 columns, but now if your monitor has lots of resolution, you can
have 4, 5, 6, etc. columns.

Photo captions are now viewable by holding your mouse over a photo (at least, this
works on my computer in both IE and Firefox).

Also, the categories "Straker and Foster Photos" and "More Character Photos" have
been merged into just "Character Photos". So there are now 4 pages total:

- New Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/new.html
- Character Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/character.html
- Hardware Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/hardware.html
- Behind-the-Scenes Photos http://ufoseries.com/photos/behindTheScenes.html

This seems like a good way to categorize the photos, although if someone has
a better idea please let me know. These categories are still imperfect, for
example...

...is this photo of Col. Lake a "Character" photo, or is it a "Behind the Scenes"
photo?

http://ufoseries.com/photos/btsWandaTimelashOutfit.jpg

...is this photo of Col. Lake by Foster's car a "Hardware" photo or a "Character"
photo?

http://ufoseries.com/photos/fostersCarWanda.jpg

...and this photo of the SHADO HQ parking lot seems not to belong to any of
these categories:

http://ufoseries.com/photos/identCarpark.jpg

Oh well, I guess the only perfect separation would be something like
"color" photos and "black and white" photos... or maybe "live action"
and "special effects" photos...

One change that is probably not so obvious to website visitors is that
these new pages will be much easier for me to change or add new photos
to, so hopefully this will result in lots of new photos in the future...

Marc






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]