A Few Late-Night Fixes to the Client Galleries
I spent tonight in the guts of the photo side of the site instead of behind a camera. The Client Galleries tool, the thing that lets me hand a couple looking at their session proofs a private link instead of a folder of email attachments, had a few rough edges I finally sat down and sanded off.
The first one was small but annoying. When a client marked a few photos as favorites, I could see the count on my end, three hearts, but not which three. Useful information reduced to a number. Now each thumbnail in my admin view shows a little heart if it was one of the picks, so I can actually act on what someone tells me they love instead of guessing.
The second was a genuine bug, and a funny one in hindsight. Uploading photos into a gallery started throwing an "out of range" error, which turned out to be a timestamp I was using to keep photos in order overflowing the size of the database column meant to hold it. A number that was simply too big for the box I'd put it in. An easy fix once I found it, but a good reminder that the small pieces of infrastructure you don't think about are usually where things quietly break.
The bigger project was speed. The gallery admin page was loading full-resolution photos just to shrink them down into little thumbnail squares, which is about as inefficient as it sounds. I built proper thumbnail generation now, real small versions of each photo made at upload time, so the page that used to crawl loads the way it should have from the start.
And then there's the part I'll admit I enjoyed building more than I should have. Client galleries hold real, unwatermarked proof images, and I wanted a way to gently discourage someone from right-clicking and saving a photo before they've actually chosen it. So now, if you try, you get a photo of my own choosing instead. Something a little ridiculous, captioned with a nudge to just ask me for the real one. It won't stop anyone determined, nothing really can, but it's turned an annoyance into a small joke, which feels like the right trade.
None of this is glamorous work. Nobody browsing their gallery will ever know a timestamp almost broke it, or that a thumbnail used to take three seconds longer to appear than it should have. But I notice it, the way you notice a door that used to stick and suddenly doesn't. The site runs a little smoother tonight than it did this morning, and there's something satisfying in that, even if the only proof is a page that loads fast and quiet.