I am making a website for a friend’s family. There are approximately 1750 images (mostly under 1mb in size) which I would like to store on my server rather than in the project. They’re paying me a small sum, but frankly that’s barely covering expenses!
Instacks Gallery 3 was recommended, so I bought that. I’ve uploaded a test folder of images, but wrestling with Gallery 3 it now seems that I require an additional stack called Remote Image to make this work. On further investigation it seems that this is only available if I buy a whole new stack called Repository Stack.
It does load files from the server, they must be sequentially named, like image1, image2 image 3 etc but there are various free apps that will batch rename files in this way.
The downside is that you cannot have individual captions for batch loaded files, they show as the file name.
I’m not sure if there is a limit to the number of files you can batch load, but I put 2000 into the Photo stack settings and it accepted that. Note, this is settings, not 2000 photos, I don’t have that many online.
Here is a page with just 20 pictures batch loaded from the server. I have had as many as 180 and they do take a little time to load, but it does work.
I have the Nick Cates Photo stack; I bought it in his Black Friday sale and I’d completely forgotten. I’m already using his Iris theme, so that might be a good way forward.
Thanks so much for the NameChanger: I’ll have a play with that. At the moment the file names are prohibitively long, but I’d put off dealing with that until I’d managed to get the images up!
The Remote Image stack lets you link to single images that you have on your server. With that number of images you’ll want to just link to a folder of images which you can easily do In Gallery 3 - just choose ‘FTP Directory / Web folder’ from the options.
This is Namechanger in action. Note the original file names on the left and the new sequenced file names on the right. That took me all of 5 seconds to do.
If I was to press the ‘Rename’ button, all the files are renamed in seconds
Do note that the default setting is to overwrite the original file names, so work with a copy of your image file folder or change the preferences.
That’s where I’ve got to, Stuart. Here’s a screenshot - have I got the link wrong? (The two images that are showing are resources within the project, just to check that it’s working)
I confess I’m not entirely clear what “root” means in this context. The domain (payntonlamb.com) is on my shared server. Does “root” mean the root files for the domain, or is the root the main server? (Sorry: that’s probably a very dumb question…)
I return with a begging bowl, because I’m stuck and clearly I just don’t understand the terminology.
I’m trying to use Gallery Stack in Instacks. I have uploaded a test file of photos and I think I’ve put the absolute path in the box. The problem is that what I’ve done doesn’t match Instacks’ instructions, which tells me to “add a Photostream Web Directory child stack”. I don’t possess such a stack; where does it come from?
I really don’t want to spend a fortune buying more and more stuff just to facilitate one website, but if I can add something to make it work easily then I guess it’s worth it. I’m afraid I don’t understand the instruction Jannis gives!
Ah, okay thanks: yes that’s what I’ve done. I was confused because the instructions mentioned Photostream.
I’ve experimented with every mutation of the path to the director but nothing comes up in preview. This is a screenshot of my Dreamhost server space; the file is in the payntonlamb . com folder. So does the file need to be in the benetta . org directory or in the payntonlamb directory (which I’ve also grabbed)?
Will it all only work once the website is live? Or should I be able to see everything in preview once I’ve got the paths sorted out?
Sorry: I suspect these are very foolish questions…
