A brand new Photo Album has been added to TampaBJJ.com! Allow me to take you on…
A Guided Tour
The first gallery, Recent Photos, is a stream of the newest pictures that have been added to the collection. You’ll also notice that the sidebar for the site now contains a link to this gallery, along with the five most recently added photos.
Next to Recent Photos is a link to Tags. This page takes advantage of the fact that every photo is tagged with words to describe it, like “Pan Am” or “Brazil”. All of the tags are listed in a “tag cloud” on this page, with each one linking to a gallery of all of the pictures sharing that tag. The relative size of the word on the Tags page also shows the number of images that are marked with that tag. For example, the BJJ tag is bigger than than the Pan Am one because it contains over twice as many photos.
I’m still in the process of adding and editing the tags of each photo, but as the galleries grows, the tags will allow you to browse the photos by theme, regardless of the exact set they belong to.
After Recent Photos / Tags come the individual galleries, with photos from tournaments, seminars or events. The title, the number of photos and a description of the photoset are all listed next to a representative thumbnail picture from the set.
Browsing to a photoset, such Florida State 2005, pulls up the thumbnails for the photos from that set. Near the top of the page you’ll find a link reading “View as a slide show”. Clicking this will open a pop-up window with a Flash photo viewer that cycles through all the pictures, with options to control the speed of the slide show, etc.
Digging deeper and viewing an individual image’s page (such as this one), you get to see the photo at full size. Above it, you’ll find the title of the photo, the date it was taken and its tags. Below it, you’ll find navigation to take you to the previous and next photos or the index. (Clicking on the photo itself also takes you to the next one.)
Underneath these buttons you’ll find any description that has been given for the photo. At this time, almost none of the photos have descriptions, but I’ll try to add them in the future.
If you bothered to follow the earlier link to the example photo, you might have noticed that when you hovered your mouse over it, a little box appeared. And hoving over this box, a little note appeared. And at the bottom of the page, why does it say something like “See this photo on Flickr (0 comments)”.
These are part of the Photo Album because it is…
Powered by Flickr
The Photo Album you see on this site is actually generated by a far more powerful and full-featured photo hosting and sharing service named Flickr.
What this means to you is that you can register for a free Flickr account (or use an existing Yahoo! account) and add comments and notes to the photos on TampaBJJ.com (not to mention everything else you can use Flickr to do).
You can sign up here.
Once you’ve sign up and logged into your Flickr account, go to Gracie Barra Tampa’s profile and add it as a contact. Once I return the favor and add you as one of our contacts, you’ll be able to leave comments and notes on our photos.
I’m sure there are even more cool things we can do with Flickr, but this is probably enough for now.
Wrap Up
Enjoy the new Photo Album! Let me know if you have any questions or have any problems with it or Flickr. You can leave a comment here to contact me (just register here first).
In the near future, I’ll let you know how you can help add to the albums and other ways you can use the new site to stay in touch, share photos and more.
