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In The Press
  March 2000 MorePhotos.com's Distributed Web Photo Application by Mike D. Jones If you've ever been married, then you know that it can be next to impossible for relatives and friends to purchase photos of the wedding. Usual SWOP (standard wedding operating procedure) involves the newlyweds and their immediate family viewing the photographer's proofs and choosing those they wish to purchase. And if they live in, say, Mazoola, Montana, and Aunt Agneis lives in Gnome, Alaska, Aunt Agneis is entirely reliant on her relatives when it comes to getting photos. Chances are, the closest Aunt Agneis, or any other guest, will get to the photos is when the photographer tells her to say cheese at the reception. This SWOP not only results in a pictureless Aunt Agneis, but it also reduces the potential revenue for the hard-working photographer. Remember him? He's the one that made Aunt Agneis look good to begin with! Enter the Web site MorePhotos.com and the development group at WD Web. Originally, they set out to provide a simple way for wedding photographers to upload pictures to a Web site, so that anyone, anywhere could view and purchase them. Instead, they wound up with a full-blown, distributed application that combines installed client software with Web connectivity, storage, and dynamic pages. In this article, we'll take a look at what went in to this site's development, and what you can learn from WD Web's hard work. The origins of MorePhotos.com When Inside Web Development spoke with Mike Connors, the owner of WD Web, he told us that his company has been in the wedding planning business for over 10 years. They had provided marketing for photographers for 10 years as well, and had two other Web sites already well established on the Internet (www.weddingdetails.com and www.partydetails.com). Through this work in the event-planning business, WD Web eventually recognized the need for photographers to display wedding photos to more than just the bride/groom and immediate family members. They quickly realized the Web was a key to that service. However, WD Web also needed a simple way for photographers—many of whom rarely, if at all, used computers—to manipulate and upload their photos to WD Web's servers. In the end, they decided upon a distributed Web application. The software portion (dubbed Photo Manager) would let photographers manipulate the photos (for example, add a watermark, crop, etc.), and at the same time condense photos to a manageable file size without sacrificing the image's quality. In addition to handling user passwords and storage, WD Web's servers would need to farm out the appropriate photos to the site's many visitors. As you can imagine, this was a tall order. Developing a useful and usable Web application In fact, the application took 1½ years to complete, and Greg Sawin, the Webmaster for WD Web, had a key role in the development. During the course of our discussion, Mr. Sawin mentioned that from the start WD Web knew they had to do more than just build a useful application. They had to build a usable one too. Before MorePhotos.com, other software existed in which photographers could manipulate their photos and upload them to the Web. But a common complaint WD Web frequently heard was that these programs were too complicated and not very user-friendly. As a result, the WD Web development team was determined to create a simple, user-friendly interface to their application. Now, 1½ years later, Mr. Sawin stated that not only was this simple, yet powerful GUI a key factor in the application's success, but also his proudest achievement in the development process. Going under the hood So, what exactly does WD Web use to run their application? WD Web uses Dell PowerEdge servers running Windows NT and IIS 4.0 power the MorePhotos.com site. VB 6.0 drives the application's installed client portion, and SQL Server 7.0 houses the collective data. Mr. Sawin states they used these products for the WD Web platform because they wanted to develop their Web application with Microsoft's Active Server Pages. The rest were natural extensions of this tool. In Photo Manager, the app uses an ActiveX control to allow the program to sample an image and control its chrominance and luminance qualities independently. The development team further refined the process to yield the best quality images at reasonable scaling for Web publishing. Of course, as you can imagine, handling such a large number of photos could easily put undo strain on their servers. To help balance the load, WD Web placed the server and the database on one machine and housed the photos in another. The database contains a filespec that points to the appropriate photo, along with specific photographer information. Some gotchas to grow on Of course, in addition to its successes, the application's development process had a few difficulties as well. Mr. Sawin mentioned that the biggest lesson he learned was the importance of advance planning, planning, and yes, more planning. ASP showed particular resistance to frequent updates due to changing specifications. Not only does painstakingly detailed planning help alleviate growing pains, but it also helps manage user expectations—in Mr. Sawin's opinion, the much more important aspect of the two. "Not only does painstakingly detailed planning help alleviate growing pains, but it also helps manage user expectations." One other technical quirk involved the Visual Basic application's communication component. When WD Web tested it in AOL 4.0, it worked like a charm. However, later when AOL released version 5.0, the program bombed. Go figure. Taking on a life of its own Of course, as is the case in most applications, now that WD Web has created MorePhotos.com, the market for their service has become broader than they expected. Many sports clubs and schools also want to put their pictures on the Web. Of course, we could all be happy with this type of unforeseen consequence. « Back to In The Press |
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Sport photographs courtesy of Contrast Photography and Gaines Sports Photography.
Wedding and portrait photographs courtesy of Jeff Hawkins Photography.
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