My dad is a Mac whiz, but adding new pictures to his portfolio on
the Adphoto website is something he
needs his youngest daughter to do.

Or so he thought. When he asked me to add a couple of pictures to the
website, I laughed and told him to do it himself.

He looked at me skeptically. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,”
he said. Having just heard G-nie Arambulo’s stories about all that
code in the Dreamweaver class she took, my dad wasn’t keen on mucking
about with all of that geek stuff.

“No, no, it’s simple! Here, let me show you.” I showed him how to log
on and edit his page. The other photographers perked up and hurried
over, jotting down notes.

“How do I remove images?”

“Do you know their filenames? Delete those lines.”

“How do I upload a new image?”

“Make a small version of your portfolio shot first. Maybe 77 pixels
like everything else? Then add an Attach: line over there, save, click
on the link, choose the file and upload. Tada!”

“Can I have categories?”

“Sure! Just add a little text. Then you can copy and paste things. You
can drag-and-drop, or you can use the keyboard to copy and paste like
this: Shift-down, Command-x, move, then Command-v…”

“Can I select separate lines?”

“Ummm, no, I don’t thi… HEY! Wow. The Mac’s way cool. What’s that?
Command- and then select?”

My dad set to work, saying, “We’re going to have food brought in.
You’re not leaving until we get this done.” He sounded stern, but I
could tell that he was excited. “Can I add something about my
interests?”

“Sure! Here, let’s write something about Mali. Just edit the page and
add your text before your featured photos.”

John K. Chua has over 30 years of experience in advertising
photography. In his spare time, he takes care of an elephant.

“In fact, you can give Mali her own page. Just add double brackets
around ‘elephant’.”

“Okay. Now walk me through this website, step by step.”

We went through all the pages. He added more detail to the About Us
page, listing cool equipment I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Seeing
him engrossed in organizing and adding to his portfolio, I snuck
back upstairs.

“Sacha, please come down to the main office.” Caught!

“The images are still too big.”

“Hmm, let’s see what we can do…” I remembered that Adobe Photoshop
has a “Save for Web” feature. It suggested saving the picture as GIF
instead of JPEG. GIF’s color limitations weren’t obvious at that size,
and the image quality was acceptable. A few clicks later, we got it
down to 12 KB: just a few seconds on any Internet connection.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” said my dad,
mock-annoyed. “Now I’m going to have to do all of the pictures again.”

I grinned sheepishly. “Oops, forgot about it.”

When he turned back to the rest of the files, I bounced back upstairs.
Now the website’s in the hands of the people who know the most about
the business. Yay! Technology to the rescue! Wikis totally rock!

Further resources:

• Adphoto – advertising photography and digital imaging
• Adphoto: John Chua – my dad’s portfolio
• Pmwiki – the wiki engine I used for the website