Success IPphotos is now www.IPYOA.com/photos

IPYOA, IPmail, IPhomeport, IPY and IP Dealers:

I am very happy to announce that after years of planning and requesting bids from programmers, we have finally succeeded in moving all the photos and all the user accounts from IPphotos into this IPYOA project. This has been one of the most challenging web projects of my career. It was made possible by hiring a PHP expert from London and a Joomla Extension designer for Photo collections from Singapore. The three of us made this project happen. We have worked on this non-stop since Oct 9th, 2015 at the Annapolis Maryland Boat Show. That was the day we officially started.

Working with these experts, we first had to upgrade the operating system of this Joomla site to the latest 3.4+ version. Then, unexpectedly, we had to buy a new server account because we did not have enough room to clone the two sites together and keep it all running. This required me to migrate all my domain names and web sites over to a new web server. (Note: This I did onboard via a verizon cell connection as we were driving down the ICW) Now, with more room, we were able to progress.

The next step was to install the photo application from Singapore. After a study of this, we thought it might be able to handle the IPphotos model I created in 2002 which has 525 photo categories and 11,500 photos from 2,000 users! Time to hire the best PHP MySQL expert. We worked on first converting the SQL database tables to plain database tables and text files so they could be imported into the databases of the newly installed photo application. Once the data was imported, the structure of IPphotos was now built into IPYOA and it looked like it was going to work.

Next the 11,500 photos had to be imported from IPphotos into the clone site of IPYOA and these photos created 46,000 photos because 4 images are needed for each photo. One photo for each display type, cell, tablet, desktop and original. After these new images were created, they were then placed into the correct file structure allowing the new application to display the data and present the photos.

One of the most impressive aspects of this project was the matching up of the 2000 users in IPphotos with the 2000+ users in IPYOA. Some matched, some did not. We ran a script that compared the two using their email addresses and we were able to merge the two sets of users together. This brought the photo albums of the users in IPphotos into their existing accounts in IPYOA. Users that had accounts in IPphotos but not in IPYOA then had a new account created in IPYOA for their incoming photos. This was a challenging aspect to the proect and it worked out very well.

The end result. We now have 16,134 photos in 1,944 photo albums all combined and sorted back into the nearly ideal structure exactly like I created in 2002 for IPphotos. Yes, there is room for much improvement, but my first goal was to simply reach this point of recreating the IPphotos structure into IPYOA. Now that we have that, we have much work to do to improve this model. Our first big task is to sort the photos that were in IPYOA (never in a category) into the proper category, but that will happen in time. We are building next a detailed photo search which will make it easy to find the exact photos you want.

For now, let us all enjoy this new rollout and have a look at the creation. This is the largest photo collection this application has ever managed and the Singapore designer is amazed. I, too, am amazed, because I had many programmers tell me over the years that it could not be done. Well, here it is. SUCCESS, it has been accomplished and I am very, very proud of the result.

www.IPYOA.com/photos here is the success!


PS:
Note #1. Make sure you include the WWW in the URL, we have a glitch that, without it, the photo collection gets confused.

Note #2. For about a month we ran two cloned sites of IPYOA, the live site used every day and our development site we built this on. Keeping two clones in sync was a very interesting challenge, but this was going on behind the scene.

Note #3. When we finished, we flipped the sites over, Live became Development and Development became Live, and here it is. all 400,000 files. We will soon delete the clone and that will give the server much needed room.

Hayden.....started this job in Annapolis Oct 9, 2015, on Island Spirit and finished it in Vero Beach, FL Nov 28, 2015. Worked every day as we were moving south!

More Images
The root categories for each yacht model


Yacht systems and modifications inside of each model


Under each category the latest albums are presented

Here is an update on the www.IPYOA.com/photos project. We are now weeks into working with this new roll-out and we have been working on server loads, server allocated memory, and server processing errors. The programmer in Singapore is working hard on these minor errors and we have installed several new versions as he keeps re-writing the code that drives the photo application. My server company Rochen.com has been looking into error codes and they have doubled the memory for the server and provided more processing space for incoming photos.

As with any photo sharing site, the real challenge is the fact that the incoming photos, taken by cell phones and digital cameras, are very very large files. These photos need to processed on the fly as they are uploaded and they need first be accepted / uploaded into the server, then the server needs to resize the photos down to the proper size for web displays, and then this app makes multiple photos to display on cell phones and tablets and desktops.

This reprocessing step is what takes server power and memory. This is also why we are seeing some blank images. If the server cannot process this step sometimes, and then it simply stops and places a blank image into that photo spot.

The obvious and best solution, as we did with IPphotos since 2002, is to have the users process their own photos down to reasonable web display image size. The best web display image size is 1024 x 768 pixels. This is the size I process all my digital photos to before I every send them in email or to the web.

What we are trying to do with this new latest greatest app is to prevent that needed resizing step. We want users to be able to take a photo with their phones and simply upload and share the images to the site. Yes, that is just like facebook, but this is a large focused community and Facebook cannot provide this web based framework. There still is a need for community web based sites like these.

So, please, please, please, try to add some photos, you cannot hurt anything. If you want the best upload, then resize your images first before uploading them. This will work perfectly.

Thank you again for enjoying the site.

PS
We are serving over 1,000 visitors a day right now!

Hayden