keyesfamily.org
Welcome to the Keyes Family web site!
If you go into the photo album and try to view a full-size image - or get prints from shutterfly - you will be asked for a user-name and password. They are guest / guest.
See a live snapshot here.
We like Geocaching: hunting for hidden stuff using a GPS unit.
Founded in 1997. Affant is pleased to celebrate a decade in business.
Full-size photos require log in.
The log in is:
guest / guest.
It's exciting to have friends and family visit us. Please be sure to drop by again! Send an email with comments and feedback.
Thank you!
As of March 17th, 2007, the KeyesFamily Photo Album is back on line!
We think you'll agree that it's much more "attractive" even though it's not fully populated yet.
We have over 90,000 photos that we have on our servers at the house; that's about 150G of storage right now. Currently, we run two 2TB NAS units that each have a full copy of all the photos and they sync up nightly. We "file" our photos in a directory structure that helps us know where to go if we want to look at something in particular. The challenge is that we do NOT want to have to do per-photo or even per-album construction of the total image volume; 90,000 images and growing is a LOT to track!
Previously, our photo web album was running on a PERL-based back-end using a script from Fuzzy Monkey. After the server at the house crashed in March of 2006, I was unable to get the script running again. Admittedly, I probably didn't put more than a couple of dozen hours into it... which is apparently not enough. The real issue was that the versions of the script, Apache, PERL, and all the IO modules were a BEAR to get in sync the first time and I couldn't find the original server setup so was trying to start over... with stuff that NO-ONE wanted to try to get running on Windows, as it's all Linux focused. I even had some help from one of the most intelligent guys I know but he was unable to do it. I considerd a Linux VM but just didn't want to deal with the extra headache.
There's two branches I've been looking at since then to get the album back on line: dynamic, PHP-based; or static HTML-based.
Since I could find very little support for a native PERL-based system - and I really didn't know much about PERL to begin with - I looked for a good PHP-based system since it seems to be the alternative to Microsoft's .NET world at this point - and I don't want to run a full Microsoft server for this purpose. The down side to the PHP model is that it requires the same level of processing power PER web hit as the PERL model did since everything would be dynamically built - albeit cached - AND it requires a lot more back-end processes, such as SQL. This means that if I move it to another PC, I need to get all the Apache, PHP, SQL, and other aspects back up and going. It also creates a security risk since I don't know how to secure such things and there is so much complexity to it. That said, if I were to go that way, everything points to Menalto Gallery as the gallery of choice. I worked with it off and on for months... but it really doesn't want to just LOOK at 90,000 images and dynamically build them into a web site; it wants to have the source images "uploaded" to a directory structure that is available via the web site itself (if you want any full-size image ability) and then it will build the scaled sizes from there. Granted, it's a really cool engine... but it'd really require me to run another full copy of the 90,000+ photos to run right. Between that and the security and effort... not ideal.
The alternative route - static HTML-based - has great interest for me since I can actually house it directly off the NAS units. That means I can keep a full backup of the site and move to it instantly - just like with all our data that lives on both NAS systems. Very appealing. The down side is that all images are built in advance of being viewed... or not at all. :P Basically, it means that every time we add photos to the library, we have to run a process to update the web site. Still... I like the concept from a reliability, processing, and effort to maintain perspective. The challenge was to find something that would handle 90,000 photos and growing.
JAlbum kept coming up in my searches. There really didn't seem to be any commercial solutions that were expecting to deal with 90,000 photos. Interest seemed to be building for this java-based, open-source, freeware solution. The problem was that no-one was answering my call for handling 90,000 photos; the most anyone referenced was more like 20,000. I kept trying ways to get it to work. After version 7.0 was released, it got better but I still could not build more than about 2,000 photos at a time without a crash. I found ways to get a bit beyond that but only with a lot of trouble.
So... months of tinkering here and there led me to the weekend of March 17th and 18th of 2007. Diana is visiting Heather in Texas and I'm at home with the boys. A new version of JAlbum just released March 13th and it seems to work with more than a few hundred images at once. After a couple dozen hours of working on it, I can successfully build as many as 10,000 photos without a crash - depending on which skin I'm using. I've got the links to the original files working without having to duplicate them. It will send original files to shutterfly if people want a print. It's promising enough that I'm going to take the site back on line.
I'll continue to look at Menalto Gallery to see if I can go to a full dynamic site... but only if I get over the jitters of security and find a way around the additional duplication of images.
If you made it this far in the reading, I'm impressed.
What's really of interest, of course, is the KeyesFamily Photo Album is back on line.
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