Broken Photo Artistic Drawing edit by Ben
I was spending WAY too much time on the WordPress Photo Gallery then I should have. I learned a few tips and tricks if you are running a Blog or Website as well and want to share photos using WordPress. Let’s dig right in, shall we?
I tried the standard Gallery and a Plugin to shrink the images sizes for me upon upload to the Media menu. This is important to do because your web pages would take a millennium to load otherwise (ok, slight exaggeration but if your photos take too long, people online get impatient and move on to something else). This was an epic failure because the free WordPress Plugin would compress the majority of the photos but many it did not or the whole system would fail to upload the images in the first place. I was uploading around 200 photos, so this method was painful, trying to find and re-upload the files I wanted to make sure were shared, doubly painful. And to make it all even worse, the photos would all be completely out of order and WordPress doesn’t have a good way to natively reorder your photos, it goes by the upload date and time.
So, the solution was to find another way to do this whole thing. First, I renamed all the files based on where the photos were taken (New Zealand, Thailand, or Hong Kong in this example) and I would append a number before the country name in the filename to help keep them in the order of which I took the photos in. I then used Photoshop to Batch process all of my photos for me, shrink them down to make sure no portrait or landscape photo was larger than 1024 pixels on either side and set a dpi to about 90. This made the files 5 times smaller than the original and they still look fantastic for sharing on my WordPress site. This made uploading the files a breeze in comparison, none of the images failed to upload and they look great and consistent. I used a great Plugin to organize my photos in WordPress the way I like it and with some trial and error and a bug workaround, it’s finally up and running the way I wanted it to look all along.
If you’re interested in how I did all the above and the tools used and Plugins installed (and aside from the cost of Photoshop, everything was free). Reach out and let me know that you’re interested!
Happy Netsurfing Y’all!