Putting Photography First

PPF was formed in 2005 as a small site for a local photography club in Tyneside, North East UK, for photography enthusiasts to showcase their work and have it reviewed. However, it has had interest from outside the UK and we're pleased to welcome participation of like minded enthusiasts from anywhere in the world.

The aim of PPF is to make it a real contender as an online photo sharing site. We're not after fame and fortune, we just want it to be up with the big boys as a leader in the field in terms of design and quality.

It may seem a little bit ironic that a feature we're contemplating adding to PPF uses the Yahoo User Interface library:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

However, if it's free to use, why not use it? PPF isn't exactly competition to Flickr, so they shouldn't mind. Using their overlay container and popup methods we've created a nice little feature that enables the image to be viewed in large-format without having to load a new page.

This 'lightbox' feature will, when introduced, make browsing the gallery a little bit quicker, and prettier too!

A while back I discovered Devshed Forums (www.devshed.com). These are valuable programmer forums that have taught me a lot in the past, and gave me some good working examples to learn and practice with.

I have decided to throw ppf open to the Devshed masses to see if any new ideas and suggestions are returned.

Well, today saw a big hosting changeover with ppf, and also the introduction of some nice features including the lightbox, and also some layout changes such as rounded boxes.

The start of things to come, but the next stages are the more complicated ones, and for the least amount of return. The photo displays all need to be driven by a central script... which wont make any surface changes, but underneath it will be a vast improvement.