It began with my needing to find a place on my website for the shots I took of the wind damage in my neighborhood. I realized that they needed their own gallery in my photo galleries pages, and as it happens I have a gallery specifically there for random home, family and friends photos.

But if you ever clicked on the link to that gallery you got a 404 because while I set aside space for that I never actually created the main page for it. That link has gone nowhere for over a decade now. Sorry.

So I set about creating the main page for that photo gallery. In the process I discovered a change I wanted to push to the four other gallery pages. So I spent some time working on that.

I spent the better part of a day working on creating that Family and Friends gallery’s main page and its banner. The gallery main pages are all basically alike, but there is a banner graphic for each and I need to create one for the Family and Friends gallery.

I don’t use a web page creator. I do all this by hand in your basic HTML…because I can. My blog is WordPress and the actual photo galleries are generated by Lightroom (which I’m still stuck on alas…). Everything else is hand rolled by me in HTML.

I had to dig to find a Photoshop file I’d originally used to create one of the banners, so I could maintain the look of all the others. There’s a bunch of layering in there to get me to the look I want. But the Photoshop file I was looking for wasn’t where I expected it to be so I ended up doing a lengthy search on the art computer data drives and my NAS.

Finally I found it, and put it where it needed to logically be. Then I opened it in GIMP and saved it as a GIMP file because I despise Adobe more than you want to know.

I had to spend some time in GIMP fiddling with the new banner, selecting just the right image files for it, getting it all to look the way I wanted it. While I worked I jumped back and forth between GIMP and FireFox to make sure the new page and it’s links were forming up the way I wanted.

Then came pushing the new pages to the web server. For some reason I haven’t debugged yet, Free File Sync balked at uploading some of the files and I had to upload them manually. So there was that tangent.

If you look you’ll notice a placeholder thumbnail there that doesn’t go anywhere. I’ll have the real thumbnails and links up soon. Hopefully.

So then, because having only one gallery of neighborhood damage shots in there didn’t seem like starting it off right…it’s supposed to be Home, Family, and Friends not Neighborhood Disasters…I set about creating a first proper set of photos for that gallery.

I figured first I’d do a set of my friends from the early days. I figured I might follow that up with a set that’s just from my Woodward shots. So I started going through my archives for those shots, only to discover that some of what I thought I’d scanned in I hadn’t.

I knew I had some really good Deep Creek Lake shots, and Ocean City shots that needed to go in the new gallery.

So I spent a bunch of time looking in my negative archives for shots I knew I had but…did I scan those or not…and if I did, were they loaded into Lightroom (which alas I am still stuck with for now). It took me some time to figure out I still needed to scan some negatives in.

I have a Lot of negatives from back in the day I Still haven’t scanned. And because I run the scanner at max resolution and noise reduction (because why wouldn’t you?) it takes about a business day to scan in a roll of 36 exposure 35mm film.

So the new Home, Family and Friends galleries won’t be up until at least the middle of this week. Not bad for a job I thought I’d just dash off in an afternoon’s work. Stay tuned…