Simple ways to create and upload a large art gallery?

[morrysillusion]

hiii back with another "help" thread or i guess "direct me to the best methods because i cant figure out what to do" thread.

ive been meaning to basically setup a gallery on my website, because i really dont want to link back to my social media, but i cant consider moving those links until i have actually....put art on my website. but with the loads and loads of art i have, the large high res files, and the overwhelming prospect of all the things i will need to throw on a page- im just not sure what way is efficient with my limited coding knowledge.

my vision is a grid layout with small thumbnails that can be clicked to open a pop up (not a new page or tab- jut over the existing page?) of the full image. the grid of thumbnails also getting longer on the page, the more i add i guess.

but i want to make sure this page 1) wouldnt take a horrendously long time to loads 2) wont fill up and insane amount of space on neocities-- im unsure if i should just be... uploading all the art to neocities, or if there is some remote way to connect this? not sure how to word that, basically i dont want to upload all my pieces to my neocities profile because i know it would take a lot of space.

lastly i dont know much in the way of details to coding galleries at all, and i will try to look into it. mostly wonder though if thsi concept would work, and how easy or complex it would be.... and suggestions/tips on hosting an art gallery on a web page like this too so that it is efficient and functional!

[Memory]

I can't guide you through the entire thing but I'd have a look at this!
https://www.w3schools.com/howt:ha:howto_css_thumbnail.asp

As for hosting, you basically have three options:

• Upload it to neocities after all, remaining cautious of file size (the easiest)
• Use your own server and host them there, and link your thumbnail to those (maximum freedom and control this way)
• Use some kind of cloud storage service such as Flickr or Unsplash (the latter will make your pictures freely licensed so anyone can use them, which is the point of the site, but it's great for hi-res hosting!)
• Offer $15 express worldwide shipping for fifty (50) reasonably sized floppy disks per image request.

[wris]

I dunno if this is the best approach, but I'd start with something like...

• Find somewhere else to host the images. The Big Tech answer would most likely be AWS S3 'cos it's inexpensive and not horrendously difficult to use, but there are likely smaller & friendlier providers.
• Try to find an effective way to generate thumbnails for your art so you can embed a small file in the page and load the bigger one only when it's been clicked on. You might end up with something like...
  
  • pic-of-my-cat-300x300.png
  • pic-of-my-cat-hires.png
• Take advantage of lazy loading to only load additional images into the grid when you scroll down.
• Use a little JavaScript so that when you click on a thumbnail, the bigger image is fetched and displayed.

I wouldn't say this is super easy, but it's also not totally unachieveable.

Hope that's (some) help.

[morrysillusion]

thank you guys for the replies! definitely giving me a proper idea of what direction to go, and how to find more information on What it is i want (since i dont know the termonology for everything when i think of it lol). it seems like hosting images on my own server is what i had in mind, and something i will certainly have to learn about. i have a means to host such a thing i just need to... read up on it!

[TheFrugalGamer]

I just wanted to point out that you can usually get away with far more compression in your images than you usually expect. There are a number of different compression methods depending on what image types you're using, so you might want to read up on those as well. That would go a long way towards saving you server space and limiting the amount of time it takes for visitors to load your site.

As an artist myself I know there's always the urge to leave it as untouched as possible, but most folks aren't going to notice the same level of detail that you do, nor do they do it often enough to justify uploading the larger filesizes.

In the past I also went the off-site route since my old host (Atspace.com) had a limit on filesizes and I had a handful of images that were too large for them. The one bit of advice I'd offer is maybe to go paid with the image provider, so that you don't loose anything. I did not, and years later when I went to retrieve files that I had neglected over the years, my image host had deleted my account and I lost those few files. Just something to keep in mind.

[morrysillusion]

I just wanted to point out that you can usually get away with far more compression in your images than you usually expect. There are a number of different compression methods depending on what image types you're using, so you might want to read up on those as well.
[...]
In the past I also went the off-site route since my old host (Atspace.com) had a limit on filesizes and I had a handful of images that were too large for them. The one bit of advice I'd offer is maybe to go paid with the image provider, so that you don't loose anything. I did not, and years later when I went to retrieve files that I had neglected over the years, my image host had deleted my account and I lost those few files. Just something to keep in mind.

thats very true, i know for a fact i could probably compress my images a bit, and i dont often care too much about sizes as long im not scrunching it down from 1200px to like 500px. and thats also a very good reminder too, i would hate to lose stuff like that so i do want to make sure i know what im doing before i dump a ton of files somewhere, but i also have loadsss of space on my PC so offline back ups hopefully wont be a problem (i have like.... 8 TB of space, which is why i id like to host myself if i can!)

[Melooon]

I agree with everything here! It sounds like what you really want is some sort of folder you can put your images in, then run a command and it will resize your images and create a html page with them all in a big grid?

There is a big of a learning curve tio it, but prob the best way to do that is Eleventy: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/tutorials/
Annd its got dedicated support for image editing: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/image/
Then you can plop it all on whatever host you like.

It can be a bit of a pain to learn, but since your site is simple and you have THE WILL! You could prob do it in a weekend

[morrysillusion]

I agree with everything here! It sounds like what you really want is some sort of folder you can put your images in, then run a command and it will resize your images and create a html page with them all in a big grid?

There is a big of a learning curve tio it, but prob the best way to do that is Eleventy: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/tutorials/
Annd its got dedicated support for image editing: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/image/
Then you can plop it all on whatever host you like.

It can be a bit of a pain to learn, but since your site is simple and you have THE WILL! You could prob do it in a weekend

yes, thats essentially what id like to have-- as much as i like the simplicity of what i code now, i know down the line it would be good to make sure its easy to manage even if the coding of such a gallery is a bit more complicated than what i currently know. i will certainly look into the above, since it sounds like quite an ideal way to have it set up mostly for the long term!