Picture Album - IDF 2007 in San Francisco

Less than couple of weeks ago it was decided that I'd go to San Francisco for business.. and so here I am. I got here at 9 in the morning of the 17th. Thought I left at 4PM of the same day 8)

The night before I went out with a couple of friends. In the morning I tried to sleep a bit too much and I ended up having to get a taxi to the airport.

To get to Tokyo airport (in Narita actually) taxi is definitely the most comfortable and quick option... the only problem being that it costs a lot of money. I spent 24,000 yen, about US $208. ..I doubt I will get those reimbursed: "what ? You didn't take the train(s) ? Why ?".

Still I think I'm almost glad I had to take the taxi. The weather in Tokyo is still hot and humid and just walking outside is a bad experience.. lots of sweating. Let alone walking outside with luggage and rushing left and right, upstairs and downstairs trying to catch trains etc etc.

Changing subject a little... as usual I've already started taking a lot of pictures... and here comes the problem: The issue of content management.

Picasa and PicasaWeb combo is really nice, but once my pictures are uploaded, there is little I can do to change them. Also it is a completely separate site from mine.
It's great that people can comment on pictures, but it's too dispersive as there is no easy way to keep track of comments in general (there is a comments page hidden somewhere, but it's not enough).
Also the really big problem with PicasaWeb is that it's limited to 1GB, after that I have to pay.. for a service that isn't integrated in my own site.. and still I just need a lot more space for my pictures !

I tried Gallery 2 several times and I know it well enough to avoid it now. It's slow and the interface is pretty clumsy.

Drupal comes with several more or less customizable solutions. The Image module by itself does good stuff, especially when mixed with Lightbox2. However uploaded images end up all in the same folder, with no way to specify my own directory structure.

..the inability to keep my directory structure pisses me off a lot. Just yesterday a friend of mine was complaining about that with iPod and iTunes and I was being the devil's advocate, touting complexity of content management, etc etc. Though my advice to him was not to use iPod for pictures 8)

So, a custom solution is really necessary I think. I already have my Python script that makes very simple galleries and I plan to work from there.

One may ask "why are you making this lame album when there are many nicer solutions out there ?". Well it's that all those solutions just don't fit my needs.
I can't bend to those restrictions.. content management is a very big issue and I believe that to do it right one needs to add coding to content. As it always is the case, where there is data there is data processing and organizing.
One can only do so much before coding becomes necessary.. that's why I'm going to try to slowly drop PicasaWeb and go for my own custom solution.

ole'