Tue, September 21st, 2004 by Brandon Stone
I recently received this in an email. What kind of advice can we offer here? I would suspect that many people have similar questions.
I’d like to ask for your help.
I am working on a project to accumulate and present “Images of Sustainabilityâ€. The project is to be sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association for their annual Building Energy conference in Boston. The plan is to invite people to share images that evoke the meaning, purpose, and living examples of the principle of “sustainability.†The appeal will begin within the member community but will encourage open participation. The accumulated images will be viewable on the site setup for the project, will hopefully inspire people to think about and submit their own images, and will be displayed as a slide show in a special room at the conference.
I am looking for the appropriate resource to receive and present the images. An administered photoblog seems appropriate. While most photoblogs seem to be personal, this would be a community project.
We are looking to create a site with these features:
- Display single images from categorized galleries
- Display text describing image and source
- Provide simple navigational tools
- Provide visitors the opportunity to comment – and list comments
- Archive images in categorized galleries viewable as thumbnails (at least hundreds – potentially thousands – if the project is successful and we continue to let it run)
- Feature to allow image sequences to run as slide shows
- “About†Page describing the Project and its Sponsors (with links)
- “Submit†Page describing the guidelines for submitting images with link to submission Page
- “Submission†form that includes required fields (are these e-mailed to an administrator to review and post – or is there a backstage area on the site that allows for that?)
- Splash page with Images of Sustainability movie
- Sidebar columns for navigation and sponsor listings
- Perhaps a banner for prime sponsor and Project logo
- Editable look and feel (we have a professional designer working on most conference content)
- Administration privileges assignable to more than one person
- Creative Commons link for those who need to control use of their work (we will appeal for the charitable donation of images by professionals).
I would appreciate your thoughts/suggestions about the most appropriate approach to this project
September 21st, 2004 at 10:34 pm
Sounds like a blog with a gallery script. There might be some hacks to intergrate different blogging and gallery scripts but they seem to be difficult to get working nicely with each other. A different solution is to just upload to a gallery and then post in the blogging script. I know Coppermine will do most of what they is asking for.
# Display single images from categorized galleries
# Display text describing image and source
# Provide simple navigational tools
# Provide visitors the opportunity to comment – and list comments
# Archive images in categorized galleries viewable as thumbnails (at least hundreds – potentially thousands – if the project is successful and we continue to let it run)
# Feature to allow image sequences to run as slide shows
“Submission†form that includes required fields (are these e-mailed to an administrator to review and post – or is there a backstage area on the site that allows for that?)
Administration privileges assignable to more than one person
The rest is just a matter of creating or editing a few file though.
September 22nd, 2004 at 12:23 pm
I created a similar photoblog for a group of us in my company--there's a bunch of us that are shutterbugs. We're a worldwide company and we thought it'd be cool to see photos we've all taken in our travels. I setup the site in about 15 minutes at http://www.my-expressions.com. You can see the site we created at http://kofaxshutterbugs.my-expressions.com.
I believe you might be able to accomplish just about everything in your laundry list with that hosted service. Good luck!