Getting Started
One of my goals with this website is to provide one central “place” for us to try and collect our important family photos and other keepsakes. While we do already have somewhat of a central place (a.k.a Mom and Dad’s garage), I think it makes sense to try to collect all our digital stuff as well. Also, by making one website to gather all of this stuff, my hope is that it will be easier and more accessible for us to all look over all these photos, videos, etc.
I decided to use WordPress because it should be a bit easier to maintain and organize, but also because it should make things easier enough for everyone (even without a bunch of techie experience) to add their own content. I’ve tried to write up some basic instructions to start adding your own content, and my hope is that we can start uploading our own photos and videos to the website too!
Creating a New Post
On the most basic level, everything is a “post” — each album or collection is an individual “blog post.” Each post can have a lot of things: description text, individual photos, photo galleries, embedded photos, and so on. So when you want to add new content, you just need to add a new post. Depending on whether you’re on the main page or in the “dashboard,” the menu option to add a new post will look something like this:
Once you’ve created a new post, you’ll be in the post editor. By default, it should be in “visual” mode, which essentially just means that you can type and format the text as you want it, and that’s how the post will appear—no need to fuss with any coding or anything like that.
Organization
I’ve decided to use WordPress’s built-in organization tools to help make things searchable and help keep everything in order.
Use the “publish date” of the post to organize the posts by the date of when the thing is/was and not the date that you are adding it. So if I’m uploading a post of my baby photos, I would probably choose to list the post under March 6, 1996 and not May 2021 (or whenever I’m writing the post).
For some posts, there may be a clear date of when the particular event was. However, for others, the post may include items from multiple days. WordPress however requires that each post has a single date, and can’t handle a range of dates. So in these cases, you would just need to choose a date to approximate how it should be organized. For instance, if you have a post of things that took place over an entire month, you would need to choose a particular date (such as the 1st of that month) to organize the post by.
The post publish date is just used for organization. So if you want to explain the range of dates in more detail, you can write that out in the text of the post.
The specific time of the post doesn’t really matter that much, so I recommend just leaving it as whatever values it defaults to.
Tags
Tags are used to organize the post by the type of content or event that it contains. For instance, I have tags for “school,” “holidays,” and “Oregon” to describe the type of event, the category of photos, or even things such as location. Tags can be anything – I recommend seeing if any of the pre-existing tags match the content, but if not, it’s easy enough to create new ones.
Categories
Categories are for the type of thing that it is – e.g. Photo Album, Video, or Other. Setting the post category is important so that the post will be displayed alongside the other posts of the similar content. Please do not create new categories, as it will slightly mess up the organization. Or, if you do want to make a new category, let me (Ben) know so I can set up a new page to organize it all.
Drafts and Previews
You can save a post as a draft. You can (and should) preview the page before officially positing it. There is a preview link at the top of the post editor, which you can use to view how the post will look once it is published.
Be sure to check the “Restrict Page” box if you want to to be limited to signed-in users – this way the website content will stay limited to people we want to be able to view it. Right now, if anyone tries to “register” as a new user, they still can’t actually access anything until the new account is approved.
Photo Albums
If you are uploading photos, be sure to categorize the post as “Photo Album.” Then, depending on the format of the photos that you want to upload, there are a handful of different approaches:
Photos on Your Computer
In most cases, you probably have a bunch of digital photo files that you want to upload. For instance, maybe you downloaded your photos from Facebook and want to reupload them here.
When you are creating the new post, you’ll need to insert a new “block” by clicking the Plus Button at the top left of the post editor. From there, you’ll just select the “Tiled Gallery” block type. There are other block types for displaying photos, which you’re definitely welcome to use, but I think that the Tiled Gallery looks best for web display:
From there, you’ll be able to select the specific files that you want to upload. Once the photos have been uploaded, you have the opportunity to rearrange the photos or add captions if you want. Then, you’ll be able to preview how they look in the post itself.
In order to get the “lightbox” effect to click/zoom/expand the photos, there is one more step you need to take. Click on one of the photos in the post editor, and then click on “block” in the panel on the right-hand side of the editor. Scroll down to “Tiled Gallery Settings” and change “Link to” from “none” to “Media file.”
When uploading files, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, remember that WordPress does scale down images when you upload. So if it is especially important that you keep a high-res copy, just know that you shouldn’t rely on the uploaded version as the only version. If you’d like, I can set up an option for you to store those high-res copies in the cloud where this website is being hosted as well. These copies would be separate from the website versions, but they would be copies nonetheless. Second, please keep in mind that I (Ben) am paying to host this website and all the content in the cloud. Currently, I am using Google Cloud Compute, which is reasonably affordable:
As we add more and more content to the website, the cost will gradually increase, but I am perfectly happy as long as it stays under around $10/month. We will probably not hit that limit any time within the short-term future.
However, the largest cost of hosting data in Google Cloud is actually the uploading. Once the files are there, it’s fractions of a penny to access them. So, if you are planning on uploading tens of hundreds of Gigabytes at once, please just give me a heads-up; I might ask you to Venmo me a few bucks to cover the shortterm increase in cost, but mainly I appreciate having advanced notice about the potential increase.
A PDF File
If you have a PDF file rather than a series of images, there is another way to upload the file so it displays in an interactive “flipbook” format. When scanning some of the old physical photo albums, I’ve left them in PDF format to preserve the page layout and the “experience” of the physical album. You may also have a PDF file if you’re uploading some other family keepsake that isn’t a photo or video. In any event, if you want to PDF to display as a flipbook, you must first “create” the book in the WordPress dashboard and then add it into the post:
From the Dashboard, find “dFlip Books” in the left-hand menu and click the “Add New Book” option. From there, you’ll be able to upload the PDF file. If you’d like you can adjust the settings, but I find that the defaults all look pretty good. Once you add the new book, it will give you something called a “shortcode.” This is a small piece of code that you need to then copy/paste into the post:
Once in the post editor, you’ll add a new “block” by clicking the Plus button in the top left corner. Choose the “shortcode” block type and then just paste in the code that you copied from above.
Photos Hosted Online Somewhere:
If you have photos hosted somewhere else online, it is possible to embed those directly into a post here so that you don’t have to deal with downloading and re-uploading.
Google photos:
This solution works okay, but does require the album to be shared publicly. Just follow the instructions here: https://www.publicalbum.org/blog/embedding-google-photos-albums
I am looking into alternative Google Photos plugins to display albums, but haven’t found anything super effective just yet. Stay tuned for more.
Flickr:
WordPress has a built-in embed tool. I believe that this also relies on the album having a public link, but I’m not 100% sure about this. To embed from Flickr, just add a “Flickr block” while in the post editor, and paste in the link to the Flickr album.
Instagram:
This isn’t necessarily a great option, because you can only embed a single post at a time. However, there may be some cases where this is what you want to do, so I’ll just point out here that WordPress has an “Instagram” block where you can paste in an Instagram URL. My guess is that this requires the instagram content to be public as well. You would just need to login to www.instagram.com on a computer to get the specific post URL.
Videos
There are a lot of different options for uploading a video. No matter the method, be sure to categorize as “Video” so that it organizes correctly.
First, you can directly upload a video to WordPress itself. Just choose the “Video” block from the Plus menu at the top left of the editor. Be sure to select “Video” and not “VideoPress.”
I’ve set the file size limit to 1GB just to keep the server from becoming too slow or sluggish. This should be enough for most purposes, but let me know if there are issues. And of course, please keep in mind the bandwidth limit that I had mentioned above in the Photos section.
You can also embed content that is hosted on other websites, such as YouTube or Vimeo. Just select the appropriate block from the “Add Block” menu.
Other Stuff
I’ve created the “Other” category as a general catch-all for anything that doesn’t fall into the Photo or Video categories. For instance, I put the interview with Grandpa Tommy from back in the 1960s into this category. Be sure to list the post in the “Other” category, but feel free to add other labels that make sense as well.