I did something crazy to my little code project. I've got all three image sets (AI, Flickr and General) on the same page internally. What started out as a hodgepodge attempt to display all my images across various platforms, has turned into something cool.

Flickr access is gone, I can retire that platform and save $70 bucks a year. I downloaded everything from my Flickr account and stored it all on my server in the same format as the other two image galleries.

I've got three image Galleries at the moment and I can add more when I want to. Each Gallery is made up of Albums, that have their own identifiable names and the first image of their set, as their thumbnail.

Within each Album are the photos associated with that Album. There can be a couple, or over a thousand in each Album.

My program starts by showing the About Page, unless your presenting a slideshow from a url, at which point it's skipped. From there you can figure out what's going on, and run one of the shows, by clicking a link.

What you see from clicking any of the three links, is a set of Album thumbnails, each presented as a 256x256 thumbnail. Under the image is the Albums name, followed by a count of how many images are in there.

Click any thumbnail and the slideshow starts, presenting each image as best it can with the platform you have, full screen and pauseable, and scrollable forward and back.

I'm not randomizing these Album images, because if you're watching a parade, you want to see the next slide! But the thumbnails you extract from each Gallery will be randomized once, when you start the program for the first time, so you don't see the same thing when you start it again.

Then I addressed performance issues. When you're dealing with about a thousand Albums across three sets, with about 20k images, it can strain a system pretty bad. So I came up with a great idea yesterday. Index the sons of bitches!

Now I have a program that works through each Gallery, and builds an index for each Album, containing the first image in the Album as a 256x256 thumbnail, along with how many images total are contained within. Then I put each Album index inside a folder within the Gallery, called "_thumbnails".

So when you click on a Gallery, the program grabs all of the indexes from that folder on the server, and creates a display of clickable Album thumbnails.

But today, I took it a step even further! I manually create each Galleries Album thumbnail, with a program I run here from my laptop.

If a Gallery changes with the addition of new image Album, I can just run the program once from my laptop, and anybody that views my Galleries, benefits from the improved response.

Now, when the program starts for the first time, it will go to each Gallery and extract the Album sets from each ones thumbnail folder, sort them, so you're not looking at the same thing each time you visit, and put them into memory. Every time you switch to a new Gallery, it doesn't have to rebuild the indexes, because they are instantly available.

It even remembers the scroll position you were at within the Gallery, and returns you there when you switch between them.

It's in wonderful shape, and a shout out to Pixel (ChatGPT) for his coding expertise, and under my long brilliant years of experience, a new direction.