I’ve wanted to make some upgrades to the photo album for quite a while and have been working these ideas out on paper for a couple of months. Here’s kind of what I have in mind:

1. Put in a general “photo gallery” category. Right now I have to create a topic and then add the pictures I want to the topic. Sometimes I just have pictures … they’re not around some specific topic. I’d like to be able to just put these pictures into the gallery category and have them show up newest to oldest when looking at that topic.
2. Add tagging to the pictures, kind of like what Flickr does and many other social networking sites. The idea would be that a picture would belong to a specific topic (or to the general gallery), but it could also be associated with any number of additional tags. The tags would be entered as the picture was put on the album with no predetermined set of tags. In other words, the tag would be anything I wish it to be.

For instance, this picture

might have the following tags:

• Nina
• Crayola
• Easton
• Pennsylvania
• smile

Then, from the page where the various picture topics are displayed, I could select a tag and see all of the pictures having that particular tag, again sorted from newest to oldest.

So, I’m working on these capabilities. First I needed to get a pretty good method working to display a set of selected pictures because then they are not in a “topic”. So I’ve built the code to do that. The initial version is at https://www.rnsmith.com/rkspics/photoalbum.php/. There are no other links to this web page, so the only way to get there is to remember it or to come to this post and click on it. Right now the program displays thumbnails of all the pictures on my web page, 25 at a time. Clicking on any of the pictures will show the full-sized version of the picture. Clicking on the full-sized version goes back to the thumbnail page. Clicking on the “next” link at the bottom of the page goes to the next 25 pictures. So, round 1 in this upgrade is underway. Let me know if you have other things you’d like to have done to the picture album software!