Remastered picture and movie galleries

Ever since we started this blog we have been using a lightweight PHP package for our image galleries. A package Romain developed probably more than 5 years ago. We liked it because it had a simple and personal interface. These days image galleries such as PicasaWeb are much fancier: you have a nice slide-show mode, images are preloaded so that you don't have to wait and some even have cool transitions between images. We thought it was time to update to these modern technologies... However, we still wanted to keep everything on our own website, with a simple and personal interface as before. After some searching I found "SimpleViewer": a small Flash-based gallery viewer. The only thing I had to do was write a small script to convert the old galleries to the new format. We also wrote a script that builds a nice interface (at least that's what we think ;-) to our image albums and movies.

Here's how to use the new galleries (remember we have grand-parents and great-grandparents reading this blog :-P):

Album Gallery (also linked in the sidebar): all existing albums are listed. By clicking on either the album title or image you open the selected album. You can also directly access the post(s) linked to each album. As you might notice, some albums have no post linked to them so you might never have seen them!

New albums: The new albums use a Flash interface. There are three ways to navigate through the pictures: -1- by clicking on the thumbnails (and use the arrows underneath to go to the next thumbnail page); -2- by clicking on the arrow that appears when you hover over the image with your mouse; -3- by using the keyboard arrows (you first need to click somewhere on the page).

Movie Gallery (also linked in the sidebar): all movies are listed. As for the albums, the links to any related post are provided. Again a few of them where never linked to from the blog. To download a movie, right click on one of the versions (indicated by the version's size and format) and select "save as" (some movies are "streamable" but due to their large size, it is not really recommended).

Hope you'll enjoy the new layout and maybe browse through our older albums and movies!

Goeric & Marie

PS: For those not having Flash a message should come up when loading an album providing a link to download and install Macromedia Flash. If it doesn't work use the third link to view the gallery using the old interface.