etchedinpixels

N/m, fixed it with CSS. It was a Studiofolio theme bug.

While I love Photon in some ways, I’m also having problems with it.

I am using the Soliloquy Slider to display photos no my front page, here https://etchedinpixels.com/
and Photon is messing with the image links. For some reason Photon is changing all the images to width=705. Like this:

https://i2.wp.com/etchedinpixels.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Middle-Falls-68_70_HDR.jpg?w=705

This doesn’t match up with the settings in Soliloquy, which are being overridden. 705px also doesn’t seem to correspond to the width of my page elements. There seems to be no choice but to disable Photon.

Is there any way to disable Photon on a per-page basis? This would be really super. If anyone knows the Custom Field argument to do this I would be grateful.

I’ve now switched to Configurable Tag Cloud.

Thanks Darren,

I wasn’t talking about actually seeing it. I thought I saw a screenshot that indicated that there would be that option, which is why I went looking for it.

Anyway, thanks. I do like this slider, but will stick with Soliloquy for now. It’s a little easier to configure and manage the slides. But I’m still looking for something better.

Thanks, the [responsive_slider] shortcode works.

However, I could have sworn that the documentation used to say that there should be the Admin > Slides> Add Slider option for adding multiple sliders.

Was I imagining things or thinking of a different plugin?

I’d like to know if there’s any benefit to the cache plugins if I’m already using Jetpack Photon to serve auto-sized images using the WP servers.

Does anyone know what the benefits really are?

Hi John (I now have my Johns straight =)

I know you’re frustrated, but I think we need to get past the frustration if you want to move forward. It’s true that the software could sometimes be smoother, but at the same time, I’m not sure how easy you expect it to be, and no solution is going to be hassle-free.

To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt: ‘Nothing worth doing is without effort.’

So, let’s start at the beginning.

1) What do you want out of a website? Do you want people to have access to your photos in gallery/portfolio format? Or do you want to blog individual images or groups of images and write stories about them?

2) Do you want to share with friends/family? Or clients?

3) Do you use workflow software like Aperture or Lightroom? These make organizing and processing large groups of images faster. You can easily upload to services like Zenfolio. Or, you can export collections as webpage galleries and just upload them to a website via FTP. This is a pretty straightforward solution.

If you just want to post galleries, then I highly recommend you head over to Zenfolio and sign up for a trial (they don’t ask for credit card info). It is by far the easiest solution I’ve found. Quite newbie friendly because it has a slick interface. Much like the Windows explorer. There are some bells and whistles but I have found that the defaults are intelligently configured, and there’s not much you have to do. I was up and running with a really nice page within about an hour. For $60 you get unlimited hosting, a great place for the videos you mentioned, blogging, webpage creation, and your own domain name. This sounds like all that you need. Just ignore the WP issue entirely.

Have you actually tried it out? I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

@kartoony

I’m really confused. There seem to be at least 2 people posting under your account: John and whoever made the last post referring to John. This unfortunately makes it hard to sort out the conversation. It would be good for you to create another account and post separately.

Which leads to a side note: WordPress supports multiple users. The different people can make separate posts, and it will note the author. The separate users can also have their own WordPress.com/org commenting accounts and avatars.

If you guys/girls really can’t bear to use separate forum accounts, it would be helpful if you at least signed your posts (although I’m afraid this will lead to even more confusion).

Thanks for taking a look. By “look the same” I assume you are referring to the similar layout that one is forced into using. Yes, one is forced into a general template and way of doing things.

For post-processing I have no one workflow. But generally I shoot RAW and do color enhancement in Lightroom. I also do skin softening or sharpening in there for portraits. Lately I have been using Photoshop and Nik Efex Pro 4 to bring out more detail and drama. That’s been pretty effective.

I haven’t been satisfied with any of the WP media organization plugins. None of them are plug-and-play, drag-and-drop. So instead I keep my photos on a separate service. When you go to gallery.etchedinpixels.com you are actually going to my Smugmug gallery. But for new users I’d suggest Zenfolio (cheaper and better organized). Zenfolio even has blogging built in at no extra charge. You really should check them out. 14 day free trial.

You could also use Lightroom to export some pretty slick galleries, and just upload them to a web server. It’s a nice solution but doesn’t have the ecommerce built in.

I prefer using some other site to host the photos because I can more easily reorganize them and update the development settings using a Zenfolio Lightroom plugin.

One thing though, if you go this route: I recommend you create local copies of your images on your WP site. You don’t want a broken image if you change something at Zenfolio.

Again, check out Zenfolio. It might save you the trouble of Webmastering. I didn’t use the blog feature but it seems like it might ameliorate the frustration you had with other services. ZF is also way more professional looking than Flickr. And more customizable as well.

I’m interested in taking a look at your images. Go ahead and add me at flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/calleyne/
or via WordPress if you have your blog online.

Hi Kartoony,

I understand your frustration. WP still has a ways to go, particularly with the abysmal media organization (or lack of it). But I think it’s not that bad. In the last month I’ve made a pretty decent website from scratch. It’s not an obvious WP site, and didn’t require really any coding… but a tad bit of CSS.

Let me know if you have any questions. You can view it here:

https://etchedinpixels.com/

I have a post where I list my recommended WP Plugins at the end. It might help
https://etchedinpixels.com/recommended/recommended_web-hosting/

I’ve had this problem too. It’s quite terrible and I can’t believe it hasn’t been caught already. At first I thought I was going crazy… my page was never updating itself. Then I realized that GC wasn’t occurring.

I can confirm that it resets itself when changing

Rejected User Agents
304 Not Modified browser caching
Caching Method (from Mod_rewrite to PHP)

Hi Sayontan,

I totally understand. A Zenfolio capable plugin would be appreciated though! Here’s hoping someone has time to add support. Thanks for all your work!

Plugin v3.5 does work with WP 3.4.2, so check your setup. What version of WP and the plugin do you use? Did you try to disable other plugins?

Under Settings I have an Auto-Schedule Posts option. When I make a new posts or pages they appear there. I can click a button next to their name to instantly publish, or I can wait until the scheduler does its thing.

All of that being said, I do wish that it didn’t operate on Pages. Anyone want to tweak the code to prevent this?

PS Don’t forget to vote on the Works / Doesn’t Work button on the main plugin tab.

etchedinpixels.com

Thanks!

I don’t know much about php but after talking with my developer friend, he suggested the URLDECODE function to convert the image filename before copying it on one’s WordPress site.

It now seems to handle the %3F symbol in my smugmug image correctly.
It takes the image URL
https://etchedinpixels.smugmug.com/Things/Still-Life/i-WrrB5bg/3/M/Giant%20peach%20moktak%3F-M.jpg

and stores the file locally as Giantpeachmoktak-M.jpg

It would be nice if it also converted the %20 to ‘_’ . But the main thing is that it seemed to handle the question mark (encoded as %3F) correctly.

I replaced:

$mirror = wp_upload_bits( str_replace('%20', '', basename( $first_image )), '', wp_remote_retrieve_body( $get ) );

with

$mirror = wp_upload_bits( urldecode(basename( $first_image )), '', wp_remote_retrieve_body( $get ) );

Prebhdev, would you mind telling me if I implemented this correctly and it’s working for you too?

The button to generate thumbs for existing posts is not where the author stated. But it is there. I don’t know if he added it after you made your original comment. Anyway, it’s not under tools like it should be, it’s under Settings > Auto Post Thumbnails.