In fact, until August last year, AjayDSouza.info served as a secondary location for displaying my photos. It was powered by a script that fetched my albums from Flickr. However, I wasn’t too pleased by the script and so didn’t bother to promote the site.

I decided to hunt for a new script today and came across Glickr. Glickr is an extremely easy to use, smal, but very powerful script for displaying photos from Flickr.

AjayDSouza.info will now serve as the primary location for display of my photos. With a little .htaccess magic, I have redirected all existing links on this blog to the site. Please let me know if you notice any malfunctions / broken links.

I plan on working on the stylesheet and theme but that will be at a far later date. Until enjoy my photos.

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Marise’s friend Priyanka’s marriage was on the 15th and as part of our custom, both the bride and the groom have an individual roce which is a traditional function.

The roce was held on her building terrace in Kurla, which required me to ride in terrible traffic out there. Got there very early in spite of this.

Early did mean that I had to wait for a while before the function actually started… an hour later.

The usual dirtying of the bride-to-be took place followed by dancing. We left the place and I dropped Marise home.

The next day was rather silent. Saturday was the big day of the wedding. Being free in the morning, I decided to head over to Big Bazaar, this time in Mulund. My last two experiences were rather bad. However, since I had Rs. 1,400 in discount coupons, I had to go make and expense. Picked up a black sweather that shall hopefuly assist me this winter. I spent last winter borrowing jackets from Ravi.

Also picked up a salwar piece for Mom, who celebrated her birthday on Sunday.

Saturday evening was the wedding. The reception was held at St. Josephs in Bandra. Marise’s sister and dad were trigger happy and I was able to collect quite a few images.

For more photos check out the photo gallery.

Stayed over at my grandma’s that evening and convinced her to come back with me on the bike. That would have made an excellent photo

Sunday was Mom’s birthday. Just a quiet lunch to which Marise came over. She left in the evening.

Spent Monday visiting banks and my barber in the morning and the rest of the day at home.

Caught the first bus from Mumbai to Pune on Tuesday morning and reach here by 10am itself.

Classes began yesterday with a full four hour class from 6.30pm on Advances in Supply Chain, followed by Strategic Marketing and Advances in Supply Chain lectures today. Thus ends the lectures for this week.

Placements is just around the corner and well I kinda tensed. A well kept secret atleast on the blog was my Preplacement Offer from the company I was in for summers, which I rejected last week since it wasn’t up to my expectations. The scene is bad this year, so my fingers are crossed.

For me the question remained unanswered until now.

Bye Bye Gallery 2

A month ago, I knocked off my photo album which was powered by Gallery 2. Gallery 2 is an amazing software, but I didn’t have the time to actually maintain yet another site. I wanted to have a solution where I let someone else do the dirty work of running the gallery.

Yahoo! Photos?

Since knocking it off I’ve considered two options, the first was Yahoo! Photos. I love the interface of the new Photos beta. I’ve got my Dad to host his pictures out there. The in-browser tool works perfectly in Firefox, IE and Flock.

Picasaweb?

About a week back I started using Picasaweb after the storage for free users was increased to 1GB.

Picasaweb is good. The software is well featured, however I faced a big problem uploading photos. It could very well be my connection, since I haven’t seen reports of it elsewhere.

No it’s Flickr Pro

The turning point to Flickr came yesterday when Flickr introduced Collections.

Honestly, the only reason I was reluctant to use Flickr was the inability to create sub-albums. Yes I know in Web 2.0, we use tags, but I like things of Web 1.0 like sub-folders and sub-albums!

Now, you can put several sets into a single collection upto five levels deep (I need to figure out the sub-levels).

I picked up a two year Flickr Pro account yesterday and have immediately started the tedious work of uploading my photos. Until I figure out how to embed the collections and photos successfully on this blog, you can access the photos at http://photos.ajaydsouza.info/.

WordPress Plugins

I’ve got my eyes on two plugins, viz. FAlbum and Photos-Flickr. I had an unsuccessful attempt at using FAlbum on this blog yesterday. I kept getting an frob error.

I like Photos Flickr from what I see so far, however, it doesn’t have the ability to display sets and collections yet. It is based on phpFlickr and I’m currently studying the code to see if I can extend the plugin. My limited PHP skills have been an hindrance so far.

What happens to ajaydsouza.info?

I was hosting my old album at ajaydsouza.info. I plan on building a site on that domain dedicated to me! (I’m a narcissist).
Jokes apart, it will be a one stop site where you can browse to the millions of profiles I have all over. Am also planning on making it a place to “frame” all my work so far.

Let’s see how that turns out… until then it is pointing to my new Flickr Pro page.

Btw, if you are on Flickr add Ajay D’Souza or Ajay DSouza or ajaydsouza to your friends list.

And once again I get into the great dilema of deciding what do I use to run my photo album. The last time I was in a similar dilema was when I had to choose between Gallery2 or Coppermine.

I’ve always been toying with the idea of integrating the photo gallery within this blog itself. Everybody remembers this URL and it makes sense.

I can do this with both Gallery2 and Flickr, however with the current installation of G2 on a seperate domain is not possible.

This means hosting Gallery2 on this blog, which is something I am not very keen of doing just yet.

I had been looking at some of the features that Flickr has to offer and concluded that the free account will definitely not serve my purpose. However, the Pro seems promising.

So here is my comparison of the two:

Price:

Gallery2 is open source and hence free for use.
Flickr Pro works out to be for $24.95/yr or 47.99 for two years, which is about two bucks a month. Affordable!

Maintenance:

With Gallery2, I have to always keep track of updates, especially security releases. Also the bundle is really heavy and occupies a great deal of space on my account. The trouble is making full installations and upgrades which has been getting to me!

Flickr will be maintenance free for me. It is owned by Yahoo! which IMO is a good thing.
I also don’t have to bother about hosting the photos as well as downtime (this of course isn’t so much of an issue).

Integration:

Integration of Gallery2 in my blog would be via the WPG2 Plugin. I do believe it integrates even across subdomains or different domains, but I am not sure. Have you got this to work?

Integration of Flickr would be via FAlbum.
One plus point of this is I already have a release for FAlbum with Connections Reloaded and this will just give me an opportunity to properly test it myself.

Features:

Gallery2 has an amazing list of features. This was the main reason why I went in for it in the the first place.

Flickr too comes with a good deal of features. Having the pro account also gives me unlimited storage and unlimited sets, unmetered (they say unlimited, but I prefer the term unmetered) bandwidth.

I do have a good deal of storage for Gallery2 as I have my own hosting. And I have a decent amount of bandwidth which I don’t consume anyway. As for photosets, Gallery2 gives me unlimited on that front, so basically the Flickr Pro is just one up on Flickr Free.
Also, I don’t know if Flickr supports sub-photosets Flickr doesn’t support sub-photosets.
Gallery2 definitely lets me have subalbums.

Uploading:

This is one place that Gallery2 beats Flickr hands down. This was also one of the reasons I chose G2 over Coppermine.
Besides the web upload you can also upload zip files and unzip them automatically. The best is using the Gallery Remote which I have been using to date.

Flickr comes with its own collection of Uploading Tools. Their Uploadr looks neat, but it doesn’t seem as many features as Gallery Remote. However, jUploadr seems to makeup for it.

One thing working for Flickr is the huge collection of third party apps and services available.

As of now, I am pretty much divided on choosing which to go in for. Switching over means a great deal of work to be done in uploading all my pictures.
However, continuing with G2 also means that if later I decide to switch that would again be a great deal of work.

Switching over also means I will have one domain free for use, which could or maynot be a great thing

Are you using either of these? Would be great if you could help me decide.

And any kind soul like to gift me a Flickr Pro account?

Hence, I decided to try evaluate the option of using Gallery 2 as the software to power my photo album. I have been using Coppermine for quite a while now mainly because of its bulk import feature.
I had evaluated Gallery but found it rather lacking.

Was stunned that Gallery2 gave me a lot more than I wanted. Especially useful was the Gallery Remote which I have been using to upload all my photos. I have realized however that I need to use the online interface as the remote is still lacking many features.

Anyway, so you can now see AjayDSouza.info in a brand new avataar.
I’m still planning on working on the template to get it done to my liking. However, this will take a while as the software is still new to me.

So do visit my photo gallery. Feedback is welcome. Registrations are not required to view the pictures.

Download falbum-wp.zip and upload falbum-wp.php included in it to the folder you have Connections Reloaded installed, usually /wp-content/olduploads/themes/connections-reloaded/

I don’t run FAlbum myself for now.
But I have plans for a demo blog which I shall install soon. Will have a live demo then.

The file uses code based on this post in Falbum forums.

Download: falbum-wp.zip

And for those who would like do, please do contribute a small amount for my development.
The amount is blank, so you can fill in whatever amount you choose.

Firstly, I moved this blog AjayDSouza.com to my Netbunch account and moved my Gallery AjayDSouza.info under my reseller account at ASHosted.

Lastly, I moved My Sherlock Holmes Pages to my Staff account of Complete-Free-Host, where I am the forum admin.

Additionally, My Sherlock Holmes Pages has been rechristianed to The Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and has a new web address. That ofcourse means that I once again have to start from scratch to get my Page Rank and popularity up
It also means that I have a lot of work coming up including a major redesign.

As of now all the sites are online. I apologize to users trying to get my plugins and themes for the temporary downtime during the shift.

However, had changed the URL of the gallery however to AjayDSouza.info and also changed the theme.

And finally after many many months of no updates and after having lost a good amount of pictures during a recent hard-disk crash, I updated the gallery with snaps of the recent choir picnic.

Was extremely thrilled to use my new digital camera, and you can see I was really very click-happy

Have taken and uploaded a lot of pictures. Though my camera easily supports a resolution of 2272×1704, I have resized all the pics to 640×480 so that they can be easily displayed on the monitor. Also needed to do so due to space constraints (unfortunately both space and bandwidth aren’t free )

Hope you like the photos.