This post is an attempt to journal some of the attempts I have made to construct a useful space for art historian Dr. Marsely Kehoe. She has been collecting images of the historic buildings along Breedestraat in Willemstad Curacao. After exploring the options available for tagging photos to particular points on GoogleMaps (mapsengine is now “My Maps”).
creating maps, Breedestraat, Willemstad, Curacao
I was not achieving the visual flexibility I needed. The purpose of the project is not to simply see one photo at a time, but to be able to look at the photos side by side as they were in the past and as they are now.
My maps?
Then I considered using a WordPress site. Assigning specific categories to each photo, I thought perhaps I could create pages that would pull up images based on separate categories. That way, MvLK could have one page of all the buildings as they existed in the 1890s and one page of a single building from 1890s until today. A website would also perhaps be easier for adding new images. As long as the available categories existed, she could upload photos, post them with categories marked, and they would be automatically appear on the appropriate page.
Why aren’t the images showing, Minimatica Theme???
After trying out a number of themes — in an attempt to show the images in the most legible way for MvLK’s purposes– Minimatica seemed great but the pictures wouldn’t show up on the main screen, even though they seemed to be properly put in; Spun, the theme I use, was nice because the pictures of each post are visible on the home page, but the buildings would be better served by square or rectangular thumbnails– I have settled at least for the time being on Arias. I have to adjust thumbnails to see if it will work. The site is willemstad.commons.gc.cuny.edu.
Welcome page
I like Imbalance 2 because it seems to keep the navigation easy, but I don’t like the distance from the header to the content.
How can you compare photos if they don’t fit in the screen?
The other complication will arise when I consider how to transfer editing control to her — I am currently using the Commons (woot!) as my workspace.
To begin with, thank you so much for the hard work you are doing with my data! And second, here is a great website, not quite what we’re looking at for our project, but a great example of something cool that can be done with old pictures and new maps!
http://www.whatwasthere.com