Picture Infrastructure

Every year I go back over the pictures I have and put up a selection of them under jefftk.com/pictures. For the first eight years or so this was just a simple list of thumbnails linking to larger versions of the images:

  <a href="family_dinner.jpg">
    <img src="family_dinner-tn.jpg"></a>
  <a href="alex_jeff_alice_rick_music.jpg">
    <img src="alex_jeff_alice_rick_music-tn.jpg"></a>
  <a href="davy_alex.jpg">
    <img src="davy_alex-tn.jpg"></a>

Clicking on a picture, viewing it, and clicking back is kind of annoying, so I added a lightbox view last year. This year I wanted a better experience on my phone, so I rewrote the lightbox code to handle phones. [1]

Over time the thumbnails got bigger and bigger as ideas about acceptable bandwidth have changed:

year height 2005 96px 2006 96px 2007 96px 2008 96px 2009 96px 2010 128px 2011 200px 2012 300px 2013 300px 2014 400px

At this point the 96px thumbnails are awkwardly small, so I've now gone back over all the years to bring thumbnails up to size and add the mobile-suporting changes I had made for 2014. I've also added srcset support for 2x displays:

   sed 's~img src="\([^"]*\)-tn.jpg"~
          img src="\1-tn.jpg"
              srcset="\1-tn.jpg 1x, \1-2x.jpg 2x"~'

(Historical consistency was very helpful here.)

[1] Code is on github.