Photos-For-You.com update (16 of 1373 or so..)

The Footer is definitely going to be the tallest ever seen on the internet :-)

It's not finished yet, but once I've finished cramming every available widget in there it'll be taller than a lot of the actual pages!

Time taken - approx 1 hour.

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Fuji HS20EXR Image Quality.

Image quality is not as good as I was expecting in a lot of situations - but it's definitely OK in most situations.

For reference here is a full size crop of a photo of a chimney taken in good light from about 40 metres away at ISO 200 which is quite challenging for any camera to get right (really light chimney, really dark roof tiles):-

Considering the camera costs less than half the price of an equivalent (cheapish) zoom lens for a DSLR - I think you would have to be pretty happy with this shot.


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Donkey Photos

Donkey Photos


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Hoverfly Photos

Hover Fly Photos

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Photos-For-You.com update (15 of 1373 or so..)

After much more messing around - I think I have the final (for now) layout, search options and filter options on http://photos-for-you.com (time taken approx 4 hours):-

For anyone else thinking of setting up a similar photo web site using Wordpress, here are the plugins I'm currently using:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cat-tag-filter-widget/
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/
http://www.gab.ro/post-sorting-reloaded/
http://bueltge.de/wp-suchen-und-ersetzen-de-plugin/114/
http://devgrow.com/sharebar-wordpress-plugin/
http://www.642weather.com/weather/scripts-wordpress-captcha.php
http://www.canhaswebsite.com/super-search
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
http://joost.reuzel.nl/about/plugins/
http://johannes.jarolim.com/yapb

Now all I need to do is sort a proper 'Blog' page and get tags assigned to every single photo on the site, sort out a decent footer, and add thousands more photos...

Time taken - approx 4 hours.

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Photos-For-You.com update (14 of 1373 or so..) All Photos Now Genuinely FREE!

I've had a change of heart about charging for commercial use of any of the photos on photos-for-you.com

Great as fotomoto is a service, I've decided to disable it for now so, *all* photos are FREE to use for anyone (commercial and non-commercial) at least until I can build a decent level of traffic at any rate.

Time taken - approx 20 minutes.

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Forest Stream Photos Added

Forest Stream


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New Photos Added

Castle Hill, Ardkeen.

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Photos-For-You.com update (13 of 1373 or so..)

I also have installed a very nice Wordpress plugin called

Cat + Tag Filter

Which you can see near the top right of the screen at

http://photos-for-you.com

This allows you to browse through specific categories and/or tags without having to specify a search term (which is nice).

After installing this plugin though, I cam across a strange problem where some of my thumbnails were not being generated and others were. When I tried to view the thumbnail image directly in my browser I got a message saying I couldn't view it as the image was corrupted! This caused me a fair bit of head scratching, until I *think* I finally tracked the problem down to it being a strange bug with YAPB where (with my installation at any rate) it doesn't seem to like it when you specify slightly different thumbnail sizes for different page types in the YAPB options. Anyway, I set all the image sizes to be the same on all page types and (touch wood) the problem seems to have gone away.

Total time taken - approx 2 hours (would have been 15 minutes if the strange problem with the thumbnails had not cropped up).

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Photos-For-You.com update (12 of 1373 or so...)

The puzzle of how to easily allow people to select different categories and or tags has been almost solved by the very useful Wordpress plugin called (appropriately enough)

Enhanced Search Form.

Leaving aside how untidy the form looks in it's current position, it is *almost* perfect, except that I found if I selected a category and and/or tags and the pressed return without entering any text I got a load of errors on screen e.g. :-

Warning: urldecode() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /home/jmcwdcom/public_html/photos-for-you/wp-includes/query.php on line 1722

Warning: preg_match() expects parameter 2 to be string, array given in /home/jmcwdcom/public_html/photos-for-you/wp-includes/query.php on line 1782

Warning: preg_match() expects parameter 2 to be string, array given in /home/jmcwdcom/public_html/photos-for-you/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 533

Yet again - as far as this project goes, I have been left wishing that I was any good at PHP coding - as no doubt I would have a simple problem like this sorted out in 5 minutes..

Time taken - approx 2 hours.

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Photos-For-You.com update (11 of 1373 or so...)

I had a lovely day out on Sunday 14th August 2011 at The Temple Of The Winds.

I go to Mount Stewart quite often as it is a really beautiful place and it is only a 15 minute drive from where I live, but the funny thing is that I have lived here for most of my life and I had *never* visited the Temple Of The Winds, which is only a short walk from the main Mount Stewart House.

Anyway, to cut all the waffle, I took the new Fuji HS20EXR camera and, amazingly (for Northern Ireland in the summer), got a whole 15 minutes of beautiful sunshine...

As these are the first new photos I have taken since the Photos For You - Free Photos web site was launched, it then occurred to me that since I was to be adding new photos to the site - how do I indicate to people that these photos are actually *new* since I now hve all the photos listed in alphabetical order.

The only solution I can think of right now is to add a 'Blog' page (who would have thought of adding a 'blog' as an afterthought to a Wordpress site??)...

I'll have to try to work out the best way to do this while keeping the sort order alphabetic on all the other pages, but it's the best idea I can come up with at present.

Here are the latest

Temple Of The Winds Photos

.

Time taken - approx 2 hours (taking, editing, uploading photos).

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Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 (is getting on my nerves).

As I (think) I said in a previous post somewhere, PSP could be better in some ways - but I'm used to it, I'm not a professional photographer, and I couldn't be bothered taking the time and effort to learn Adobe Photoshop.

But it is *really* starting to get on my nerves now.

YAPB for Wordpress allows you to use IPTC data to automatically name the your blog posts and add tags to the the blog posts.

Which would be perfect *except* when I try to add tags to a .pspimage file - I get a message saying "Storing metadata to the selected filetype is not supported".

What??

What the hell is the point of having a nice 'organizer' view which allows you to add tags on mass and assign them to your original images, when their own filetype does not support it??

Corel - this really beggars belief...

OK - So maybe I can try and save it in .tiff format so I don't lose any image quality on my original image. NO!!!

"...NO EXIF information will be saved. Would you like to continue?"

Arrrrggghhhhh... Now I'll lose the date the photo was taken on and can't automatically use it as a post date in Wordpress..

Doh!

OK - Maybe I should have gone down the Photoshop route after all....

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Photos-For-You.com update (10 of 1373 or so...)

After much messing around with Corel Paint Shop Pro, and having wasted a lot of time downloading Corel PaintShop Photo Project Creator (in the mistaken belief that it would give me the ability to create decent collages with minimal effort), I finally settled on the 'Film' picture frame style in PSP, and then manually rotated and pasted a few photos to create thumbnails for each of the main photo categories (colour, black and white, and sepia).

Here is what the home page now looks like :-

The category pages also look the same.
It's very far from perfect, but it's starting to take shape.
Next step is to put the category thumbnails in the footer (I am thinking of having a really *massive* footer with a lot of options in it), and then start work on a proper search page that allows users to select specific categories and/or tags as well as keywords.

Time taken = approx 2.5 hours (would have been 15 minutes if I knew what I was doing).

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Photos-For-You.com update (9 of 1373 or so...)

I have now got posts (i.e. photos) to sort by title rather than by date which makes a hell of a lot more sense after doing a lot of bulk uploads which rendered most of the post dates irrelevant anyway (note to self, make sure to preserve EXIF photo information in the future).

Big thanks to the following Wordpress plugin for making this possible without having to resort to (yet more) PHP :-

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-sorting-reloaded/.

Next step in the project - make the home page more attractive and user friendly...

As always - to see the latest progress for yourself, see :-

http://photos-for-you.com/

Time taken = approx 15 minutes.

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New Camera Finally Arrives (Fuji HS20EXR)

First impressions are 'Oh My GOD! - the electronic viewfinder is AWFUL'. But that's what you get for switching back to a bridge camera from a DSLR.

Apart form that, and the image quality in poor light not being as good as the Sony A350, first impressions are very good.

Here is my first panorama shot which I spent all of 10 seconds taking and processing (in pretty poor light) (rotated 90 degrees):

It's also not bad for macro shots especially bearing in mind that the whole camera costs less than a half decent macro lens for a DSLR.

It also does 30x zoom pretty well which is the equivalent to a 720mm lens on a full frame DSLR! (But to get really good quality shots at this level of zoom - more sunlight than I have today is pretty much a necessity).

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Photos-For-You.com Progress...

I have added the site to Google Webmaster Tools and submitted an XML sitemap.

I am a bit sceptical about the need to submit sitemaps to Google, but in this case I think it was a good idea, as I had (somehow) made changes that rendered some of the original blog post URLS unreachable...

For reference here is the traffic from 25th July to 9th August 2011 :-

You can see that there are a reasonable number of referrals from social media - which just wouldn't have happened a few years back...

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Fotomoto Prices..

As I mentioned before, Fotomoto seems like a really great service which takes pretty close to zero effort to set up (there is a great Worpress plugin), and it costs £0.00 to sign up to and use.

I have enabled it for all full size photos on my web site

http://photos-for-you.com

The only thing I am having difficulty with is what to charge and what currency to use for a download with commercial use license. Going by previous experience, I'll be lucky to sell more than one photo a month anyway, but for some reason in the past most of my sales have been to the UK in Sterling - so that is the currency I have chosen. Since most of the full size images on my site are under 1 Mega Pixel, I've decided the most I could possibly charge for them is £20. So this is what I am starting out with. Once I've had 100,000 visits and no sales, I'll maybe look at this again, but I still don't envisage photo sales earnings being more than 5% of AdSense earnings.

By the way, Fotomoto do give you the option of specifying an FTP repository where they can pick up high resolution versions of your images to sell on your behalf which is a great idea, but I don't think I'd sell enough photos to justify the time an expense in setting this up (It may be a different story if I was a first rate photographer with really amazing images like Captain Kimo with his HDR Photos.

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New photo web site update (AdSense Layout etc.)

Got the layout fairly good now for landscape photos e.g.

Sepia Foxglove Photo

Not quite so good for landscape photos e.g.

Saint Patrick`s Cathedral, Downpatrick

I had previously had the full size images resized to 728 pixels wide so they were exactly the same width as the AdSense adverts directly above and below the photo. From an AdSense point of view this was perfect, but it reduced the quality and size of the image to the point where I think it would be much less likely that someone would actually share the page or buy the photo at that resolution from Fotomoto.  So now I just have to work on making the header and footer a little bit wider than my widest photo which is currently 1154px (this is not as easy as it sounds when working with Wordpress themes).

I currently have one 728x90 AdSense unit above the photo, and 2 below the photo, which seems about the best I can manage at the moment (Ideally I would like the top and bottom units to be the same width as the photos and to have a unit at left and right the same height - but that's just not going to happen...)

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New Camera Ordered.

Fujifilm FinePix HS20EXR Digital Camera - (16MP, 30x Optical Zoom) 3-inch LCD.

I know that in some ways this is not as good a camera as the one it is replacing (A Sony A350 DSLR). But I'm not a professional photograher, and I don't want to carry 3 different lenses around with me (or spend thousands getting all the right lenses).

This bridge camera should suffice for all my needs 99% of the time.

Though if I find that it is nowhere near as good as the DSLR, then I'll start saving again ...:-)

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