Here we go! Lots of work to do…

The update has finally started. The basic setup for the page is almost finished, now it’s time to concentrate on the main content, the images. It will be a very slow process, there are too many images to edit (resize some, add watermarks to most, rename a few), many things to fix, many new sections to create, the menus for the page need to be organized, etc.

I have finished cleaning up my image archive and I kept just the images that I really like, maybe I deleted 30% of the old ones made with UltraFractal and Fractint, there’s no point in keeping these ugly ones, some are from a bad period as I will talk about later. In the Apophysis gallery there will be some ugly ones, but just as a reference of what was going on back then, that software was just a new discovery and the images were really simple until the new flame fractal softwares appeared with more resources. The first gallery is active as a test, for the Fractint images (better start with stuff from where it all started!). The galleries will have (probably) 12 images each, most images will have about the same dimensions and aspect ratios. The Ultrafractal galleries will have more images, or else there will be too many galleries. Old images are probably still in 4:3 format, new ones may be in 16:9, but there are some that don’t follow these formats. There will be individual pages for each gallery, that will appear in the “master” gallery page for the software used to create them, so maybe these galleries can be even enlarged as they go with extra images to avoid having hundreds of individual galleries (individual galleries also avoid a gallery having hundreds of images…).

I don’t really like the appearance and styles of the gallery plugin I’m using, but… we’ll see if I can customize it in some form. I prefer to have the images in thumbnail formats instead of slideshows or other fancy formats, this way it’s easier for the user to see what he wants to see directly instead of scrolling through a series of images. When you click a thumbnail a larger version of the image appears (duh!) but there is sort of a “camera roll” below the big image that is quite annoying and clumsy, I might try to remove that if possible. It also has links to share images to social media, which I really don’t want to have enabled at all.