Our Wedding Photos
Last Friday, Joey and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. For a while I had been hoping that to celebrate the occasion, I would finally attack that big project that has been on my to-do list for the last… uhhh… five years. That is: Digitizing all wedding photos and mementos and making the nice wedding web site I couldn’t do in 2001, because at the time I didn’t know any HTML.
My plan was to get it all online and send a nice HTML email to friends and family inviting them to join us on our trip down memory lane, because our wedding was so intimate, so nice, and so special, I think many of those who attended it, and specially those that couldn’t make it, would enjoy seeing our wedding photos. But the last weeks I’ve been busy with work, and as Thursday approached, Comcast decided to make my life impossible, and made me spend 48 unbearable hours without Internet access. God! Was I mad!… So the project had to wait until Saturday, and unfortunately this is not a small task.
I was able to scan a significant portion of the photos, though not all of it. For those who attended our wedding, you may remember our little guest book with Polaroids and personal messages… Well, I’ve been really wanting to scan those pictures before they vanish in a yellow cloud, so I’m happy to say that I got that done. We also watched our wedding tape, and I was able to extract some images from an event for which we have no professional photos whatsoever: That is, the beautifying process of beautiful bride Maria right before the wedding. We started watching the tape, and Joey’s first comment as soon as he saw me on it: “Pilli! You look so young!”. Grrrrr!!!… So anyway, I captured some photos of that too, before someone tapes over our wedding video. I kind of like them.
Initially, I considered using Flickr to post all images. However, the recent Bitacle mega-rip-off and some other scary reports have reminded me of my initial concerns about sharing personal photos with the public. So I thought I’d post these only for friends and family. Problem is, most of my people still refuse to sign up for a Flickr account, or have issues with the site, or whatever. And then I also thought I’d like to present our wedding images a little nicer. So I started designing a custom web site, and then decided that instead, I’d use my own WordPress gallery templates, and customize them a little bit.
I can’t resist to show a little sneak peek:

This is the main gallery page which lists the different categories for photos. Each category has its own page of thumbnails, which in turn link to each photo page. Obviously, this being completely custom-made, it is not the most efficient and quick way of putting together a simple photo gallery. But I’m weird like that and enjoy doing things the hard way simply because of the rush of the creation process.
I hope next weekend I’ll be able to finish it. It needs to be pretty, work in all browsers, and speak English and Spanish… It’s a lot of work, but the memory of our wedding deserves it.