I finally upgraded to Drupal 5.1, which meant that I had to upgrade my smugmug module to be Drupal 5.1 compatible. Brian Foley did most the work in getting it going, I just fixed a few loose ends. For those that care:

The Smugmug module for Drupal 5.1 has been freshly released (a few moments ago) as version 1.05b (beta). I've only tested it a little bit. There are many changes that need to be done for menu/config placement as well as the on-website help.

If you are currently using the module, you'll need to drop all the smugmug_* tables and import the new ones from the smugmug_databases.sql file. I don't have time to write the update scripts, and I don't even know how (yet). I'm currently packing my bags to leave for Europe next week. If you find find a bug, please let me know. I'll only address critical ones for now, and any cosmetics, I'll fix later.

The address for the nightly build remains the same:
http://www.warmy.com/smugmug-nightly.tgz as of right now, it's version 1.05b

I have some new features planned for when I return. Keep an eye on the change logs.
http://warmy.com/sm-changelog.txt

I've been using a program called IMatch to organize my photos. It's a really sweet tool for those of you who want more than the basic organization features of Picaso. IMatch isn't free, but it's worth it's price! IMatch is basically a database program that handles images. You can set it up to track anything, and track it several different ways. I use it to track who was in the picture, where the picture was taken, who took the picture, and a description. Fairly basic. However, you can have it track ANYTHING you want. You setup a database layout of items you want to track or enter, and it just does it automagically. The interface takes a bit to learn as there's ALOT of features. If you want to compare it, IMatch is to Google's Picaso as Photoshop is to Paint (that comes with your computer).

I also put all my pictures into categories. This could be from various events, locations, types of items in the pictures, etc. Between the database portion, and the category portion, I can quickly pull up all pictures taken in 2005, with 2 or more people, in nature where there's a waterfall. It does take a little time to put all this data into it, but it's really worth it since now I can show you all pictures that one of my friends is in, etc. If you take alot of pictures, IMatch is your friend.

Anyways, the power of IMatch comes in to play with scripting. You can write your own (or download them) scripts that manipulate images, create uploadable galleries, update information, etc.

How I use scripting (so far): So, I've entered a description of each picture. Another field has peoples names. I also put each picture into categories. Now, I run a script and it copies all this infomation into the IPTC portion of the jpg file. IPTC is an area of a jpg file that lets you store text information such as where the picture was taken, copyright, description, keywords, etc etc. So, now my image file has descriptions and keywords, as well as copyright information all self contained. Now, in my windows explorer window, I simply right click on the picture or pictures I want on smugmug and click on "Send to smugmug". The "Send to smugmug" program launches, and asks me what album I want the photos uploaded to, or it'll create a new one for me. This takes me a minute fill out. I click upload, and a few minutes later, all my images are uploaded. Smugmug read the IPTC information and imports the description and keywords so they can be displayed with the image! Pretty slick!

I'm getting closer to done with the smugmug gallery integration. You can now view the albums and the images right from a drupal site (such as this website). This module gives the apperance that your photos are on the same webserver.

I'm getting close to releasing a beta version of the module. I have a few more loose ends to tie up (code hardening against hackers). Anyways, the album layout isn't quite finalized yet, but it's a good start!

If you want to keep up on this, please see my drupal.org post.

Some of you may not know this, but my photo album is not really hosted on the same website as my warmy.com site. My photos are actually hosted at a site called smugmug (http://warmy.smugmug.com). The reason why you see my pictures on my website is because I developed a special program that runs on my website, it's called a module.

This module gets data from the smugmug server in a way that computers can easily talk to each other - XML. This data contains image, gallery, and other information about my images stored on a different server and displays my pictures within my website. Basically, it makes it look like my images are on my personal web server, when in fact, they hosted on a complety different computer on the other side of the country.

How I make my images appear here is through the use of a specail tag. I type this: [smug mug|id=72911763|size=tiny] and you see this:

Pretty neat huh? I can change the "t" to various sizes, such as small, medium, large, or original size. I can also change this to "x" followed by a custom pixel size. :-) Anyways, enough geek talk here, more details here: http://drupal.org/node/70166

-Mitch

I'm converting my photo album over to Smugmug since they have categories to help organize my photos. Flickr doesn't allow this at all. Oh well, so much for flicker.

The only down side to smugmug is that there isn't a decent sized image for photo blogging. Also, I don't have links to the Smugmug site on the pictures until they authorize my API key and I finish development of the Drupal module that accesses smugmug through their API interface.