For whatever reason it dawned on me today that I’d started putting together this new blog of family photos however many months ago, and then even after struggling to get the swanky domain name that I wanted, I don’t think I ever actually got around to sharing the link or even writing a post about it.

So – here: SevenerFamily.photos

I literally just changed the theme up this evening (as well as the theme for this project as well), so apologies if there are any bugs or weird views at this point – I haven’t really had a chance to look at it on anything other than my desktop. But I think it looks good here and let’s be honest – this site is primarily for the family, so it’s good enough for now! 😛

I believe if I dig into the post history for that site, the last time I was adding photos I made it to around last summer before I got sidetracked off in another direction, and even then the little sidebar counter tells me that it’s already got over 300 photos online. It’s definitely daunting if I look back because we’ve got years and years worth of photos to go through, and yet I still want to do it because otherwise it kind of feels like a waste to just have them all sitting on a hard drive collecting digital dust and not in any sort of format that makes them relatively easy to flip through and reminisce over from time to time.

That’s really where the whole project came from – I’ve mulled back and forth over using Flickr or Picasa or other various sites for the longest time, but each one always seems to have one little detail that’s just frustrating enough for me to want to bail on the whole thing. Most recently I thought Flickr was going to be the solution with their 1 TB of space for photos, but I hate that you have so little control over ordering galleries because at the end of the day it is still a photo album and I want to be able to scroll through chronologically to look at all of our different pics over the years…

So anyways, this is my latest incantation of said project – it lives in a WordPress multisite install along with most of my other personal blog projects, mostly leveraging the Photon feature of WordPress’s Jetpack plugin, not because I’m super concerned about bandwidth, but moreso because by hosting the photos on the WordPress CDN it also gives me the option to arrange photos in those cool mosaics on the fly – all I really have to do is upload the photos to WordPress, insert them into a new post as a Gallery with the Tiled Mosaic option, and WordPress does the rest!

The thing I do need to make more of an effort on is just getting more photos uploaded. Today I’ve spent maybe an hour or so to get caught up from January – March of this year, which isn’t too bad when I just have Facebook and our phones to look through for worthwhile pics to add, but I need to try to set aside an extra hour every few weeks to keep pushing through that backlog so that a year from now we’ll at least have photos online through when the first kid was actually born. 😯

I keep trying to convince myself that once I can get past Christopher’s birth, the whole process should go a lot quicker simply from a lack of child photos … yet that’s still a good year and a half from where the galleries end today…