Like many photographers, my first photoblog was based on the Pixelpost platform. Pixelpost is a free application that got a lot of things right from a photographer’s viewpoint and did it with relative clarity and simplicity. Alas, as time went on the number of volunteer Pixelpost developers dwindled as they got busy with other (more profitable) things, and the program became an orphan that was last seriously updated in 2008.
Time to move to WordPress. In doing some research, I found very little information on how to best make what I anticipated would be a painful and time-consuming transition.
First, I needed to choose a WordPress theme. I ended up choosing Photocrati, though if I had it to do over, I would choose something else. I think the theme is overpriced for what it delivers, and it’s also being updated a lot less frequently than they said it would be.
Exporting
Anyway, I then found Scotsman Owen Billcliffe’s blog, where he has an interesting account of his own migration from Pixelpost. He also had a link to the first plugin I needed: Jeff at ElevenTwentySix has a Pixelpost plugin to Export from Pixelpost to WordPress. All my posts, images, and comments transferred into WordPress with utter simplicity using this plug, rather than being a tedious post-by-post manual chore. The plugin costs $15, but it’s well worth the hassle savings, and the money gets donated to the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society.
Making an Archive Gallery
I next wanted to add one of the features I liked most about Pixelpost, which is the ability to create an archive gallery of thumbnails of all images and to also generate subgalleries of thumbs by category. WP is a lot more difficult to manage in this respect. It turns out I needed a WP plugin called Image Archives. This is so far the only plugin I’ve found that will create a Pixelpost-style thumbnail gallery of your images. But once installed, it’s not immediately clear how to use it or modify it for this purpose.
Scouring the interwebs turned up only one tutorial on customizing the Image Archives plugin. It’s a very helpful one by Brooke at Killer b Designs, and it solved the problem for me.
Thumbnail Management
WP doesn’t have much in the way of built-in thumbnail management like Pixelpost, but I found a helpful plugin called Regenerate Thumbnails. It’s fairly self-explanatory once installed, and I use it if I need to resize or crop my archive thumbnails.
Coming from Pixelpost, WordPress certainly took a lot of time and effort to get my head wrapped around it well enough to understand how to sort of make it do what I wanted. Many thanks to the authors whose articles and plugins listed here helped me quite a bit.