Lightboxes are really irritating. No users I ever speak to like them, but all website owners love them – communication problems there, maybe?

Here’s why I don’t like lightboxes:

• They usually override keyboard functionality. I use my escape key to clear fields and I use my arrow keys to navigate pages – don’t overwrite that. I know best, not you.
• They’re unnecessarily schmancy and animated – if I opened a lightbox, chances are I want to look at a picture and nothing else. Leave me alone otherwise. I don’t want to see your great “close” icon or any of that crap so just drop it!
• Some are nearly impossible to close

There are probably a bunch more reasons, but you get the idea.

My lightbox stays out of your way. It doesn’t override any standard keyboard behaviour and it doesn’t use visual fluff to irritate you. What it does do is open a big version of the picture you clicked on so you can see it in more detail. When you’re done, it closes. Here’s how you use it:

• Click a flickr image to open the lightbox (this might be the last time you need your mouse/trackpad)
• j = next
• k = previous
• o = open the flickr page for this image
• q = close the lightbox
• You can also click anywhere to close the light when it’s open

If you’re wondering why j,k,q; use Vim for a day. I would’ve used e to open, but who’s going to remember that?

I’m probably going to implement a resizing thing for people with small monitors so that screens don’t get flooded – if this affects you, please tell me whether you’d like the process to automatically detect your browser size, or whether you’d prefer to handle it yourself. I’m aware that this will affect basically all portrait images – this will probably make me make it automatic. Pictures are pretty pointless if you have to scroll, but I’m tired now and can’t be bothered.

If you want the code for this, view source and find the javascript yourself. There’s a PHP file to make Flickr API calls, but that encapsulates my API credentials. If you can’t figure out what to do here, holla so we can all have a good laugh.

It’s gone. 4 years and 30GB of photos gone because of a stupid lapse in concentration. All my originals are just nowhere – rsync –delete really fucked me this time!

Never the one to look on the dull side of things, this presented an interesting challenge. Seeing as I don’t know exactly when it happened, the chance of an undelete was pretty slim. So I turned to Google to see what was available to me in the way of backing up my flickr photos. It’s not quite 30GB of originals, but 1145ish decentish resolution exports is much better than nothing.

There are a couple of things available, but the only notable one is Java, slow, crap and doesn’t download some photos with no explanation, so that’s that. Seeing as I basically only wanted a straight backup of everything of mine on flickr, I figured that there had to be a way that I could just get a list of all my photos so that I could archive them and be done with it. This wasn’t really the case, so I opted for using flickr’s API calls for everything in sets and everything not in sets. Because, if I ever decide to put it out in public, I wouldn’t want it getting abused; I’ve decided to use flickr’s authorisation API to confirm the user as well. It works really well, and is downloading my originals as we speak.

The only potential issue is, because it puts your set photos in their own directory, there will probably be some duplicates, but I’d rather have 2 of one than none. If you want a copy of the script, you’ll need OSX/Linux with PHP 4 at least. Leave a comment and I’ll email it over.

And, now it’s time to start a new era of photos.

I totally forgot to take a photo. Like completely. It never even occurred to me and now I’m mad. Luckily, I was trying to demonstrate how cool my hair is and took this piece of crap on my phone. It’s hardly enough though.
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