I finally succeeded in:
- being able to choose which pictures I want to include/exclude from the sidebar photo sideshow.
- adding a caption below the picture which uses the EXIF info stored in the picture (JPG) itself.
Both of these don’t sound like very much — should be easy to do right? Wrong! To do the two above items, one has to know HTML, CSS, Ajax, PHP, EXIF info, Gallery2 Photo software, WordPress design and WordPress theme design, etc.
And how to DEBUG most of the items on the list because it never goes right the first, second, third, etc. time.
Lots of stuff to learn and I ain’t so young anymore.
I started the usual way by looking at a lot of other people’s plug-in code. I wrote a couple of widget scripts — convert a normal plug-in so that it can be easily used on the sidebar. (The right column on the K2 theme that I am currently using.)
So I intensely focused my energy on revising/rewriting and creating a new photo slide show which used the same fading slideshow as you see on my blog, but without using Gallery2 to store the photos. I got what I wanted working, but when I tried to turn it into a WordPress plug-in, I couldn’t get it to work.
So I tried another tack - to use a nautical term. Since I had already written some PHP code to extract the EXIF info from each JPG photo, I used that knowledge and worked to analyze the Ajax/Javascript code to include the photo’s description under the slideshow picture. I also had to figure out the database layout of Gallery2 to find out where the “title”, “description” and “summary” data was stored for each picture, design a SQL query to retrieve the data from several tables and then figure out how to get it placed into a Javascript ARRAY and finally how to pull out the description information for each picture when it was displayed on the blog. Whew.
I did it, but it took two weeks of intense learning and focus to learn enough to understand what was happening so I could do what I wanted to do. I still need to explore how to increase the size of the slideshow “box” so that the long descriptions have enough room to display properly.
It was one of my desired goals to have a slideshow which displayed my most recent pictures in thumbnail size with descriptive captions and also allowed the viewer to view a larger image/slideshow. So now it works!