Life magazine images digitized

Google has just added all photographs published in Life magazine as a searchable index. Just do an image search and append the string ’source:life’. You can take a visual tour of recent american history from before the great depression to the end of the cold war. Here are some photographs I found:

Atomic Testing

 
Marylin Monroe

 
Ku Klux Klan

 

Viet Nam

 
Random

 
 
Google Images source:life is well worth browsing for a few minutes or a few hours if you have the time. Here are some searches I particularly liked: Big Bend National Park, New York World’s Fair, Time Covers from the 60s, Time Covers from the 50s.

Meow

Kathy and I have always had cats underfoot, usually 3 or 4 at a time. You can read more about them at our shared web page. Below is a gallery of shots in chronological order spanning about 25 years. It all started with Nugget…

Click any image below to enlarge…

Nextgen Gallery Plugin

I highly recommend the Nextgen Gallery Plugin for managing picture libraries. You can see examples of its use here.

Start by reading David Potter’s Introduction to the plugin. 

The biggest issue I ran into is increasing the memory limit for PHP as whole. Fix that by setting
    php_value memory_limit = 48M
in php5.ini AND add the statement
    define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘48M’);
to wp-config.php

Setting the value in php5.ini only seems to affect the root directory. So uploading large images still ran out of memory until I also modified wp-config.php.

I also had to increase the php_value max_execution_time in php5.ini as processing some pictures batches takes minutes.

Once its setup, using it in posts and pages is simple:

[ slideshow=id,width,height ]
[ album=id,extend ] or [ album=id,compact ]
[ gallery=id ]
[ singlepic=id,width,height,mode,float ]
[ imagebrowser=id ]
[ tags=name,name,name ]
[ albumtags=name,name,name ]

In real code, omit the blank spaces after and before the brackets. There is no way to escape the sequence to prevent the plugin from processing when I try to quote the code here. Introducing spaces causes the gallery plugin to pass over the text.

Photo Category

I shoot quite a few pictures (since digital costs nothing until you print it). Rather than just stuffing “My Pictures” I will share some of my favorite photos with you. Watch this space for new galleries and photographs.