When I started this project I intended to publish an update every day as I made progress. But neck troubles and an apartment hunt kept me too busy to publish updates, or for that matter, make as much progress as I would have liked. Still, just a few hours short of 2 weeks, here is the status.
Current Status
- display list of folders containing pictures
- click a folder to select it
- display thumbnail placeholders for each picture in the selected folder
- click on a thumbnail placeholder to select the corresponding picture
- display a placeholder for the selected picture
This is what the picture server looks like at the moment:
Next Steps
We need to display actual thumbnails and pictures instead of thumbnails. In order to do this, we need to do the following things:
- build adapters for common formats, especially camera raw (because that is the format in which most of my pictures are in)
- while crawling, generate thumbnails for each picture
- while crawling (or when requested), convert camera raw pictures into jpg or png so that the browser may be able to display it
Another thing which ended up consuming some time was my latest attempt to wrap my head around relay. I seemed to have the server side (graphql) working ok, but relay confounded me yet again (I have previously tried to use relay for Horace, unsuccessfully). Remember though that this is in no way a shade on relay or graphql. It just means I need to devote some more time to understanding the thing (or be in a position where I absolute need to use it).
Once I gave up on relay, I decided to invest time in understanding redux instead of rolling out my own flux-like implementation (which I had done for Horace). And boy am I glad I did. Redux is absolutely beautiful, and quite easy to understand and start using quickly. I used their official documentation and I was up and about in no time. And while I'm fairly certain my current usage of redux has plenty of room for improvement, it is ok for now considering how close I am to running out of time :)