Jennifer Yee, the owner of Faction Photography, asked that I design a website which could be used to display her photos. She envisioned a site where her photos could be displayed in interesting mosaics instead of in typical boring galleries.

I built a website for her that allowed her to set up multiple galleries of photos, each of which could be fully customized using a custom-built back-end interface. Once the site was built, she was able to create, rename, hide and delete galleries as well as upload, rename, recategorize, caption, hide and delete images at whim without my help. She was also able to build and change her photo mosaics using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Ms. Yee also requested that three additional sections ("Home", "Bio" and "Contact Info") be added to the website. Although these categories could not be deleted, the back-end interface gave her full control to edit the text displayed in these sections.

Have you ever seen a website with outdated content, because the site's owner needs to rehire the developer to change even the simplest text? This can be easily avoided with a system like this.

From a technical standpoint, the faction photography back-end user interface uses AJAX to communicate with a PHP-based server. The user interface also makes heavy use of DHTML to allow in-place editing of image filenames, image captions, category names, etc. The photo mosaic editor is built using JavaScript and responds to mouse and keyboard events to allow you to move, resize and restack the images.

If you are interested in exploring Faction Photography further, please visit AEdelstein.com/FactionPhotography. You can even log in to the back-end using the username guest and the password password although you will not have any write access (all your changes will fail silently).