What part of shrine-building drives you nuts?

[Destinie]

There are certain essays that I feel obligated to write sometimes and that will bother me. Maybe I should just not write the articles that I feel like I should have and just write the ones that I want to have? In older sites I used to feel like I had to write about the character's relationship with ALL the characters and the essays, I felt, turned out to be dry and boring. So I started thinking about just focusing on the relationships I wanted to talk about or felt were important. And there are other small essays, too.

Sometimes I hate making buttons. :| As seen with my Luxio shrine...

[Robin]

There are certain essays that I feel obligated to write sometimes and that will bother me. Maybe I should just not write the articles that I feel like I should have and just write the ones that I want to have? In older sites I used to feel like I had to write about the character's relationship with ALL the characters and the essays, I felt, turned out to be dry and boring. So I started thinking about just focusing on the relationships I wanted to talk about or felt were important. And there are other small essays, too.

Sometimes I hate making buttons. :| As seen with my Luxio shrine...

AGREED on all points. I used to feel the same way about my shrines--as if I "had" to include certain content to make it a legitimate shrine or something, even if I wasn't passionate about adding whatever content it was. Too much pressure! I like your idea of personalizing your shrine by just including the content you're most happy with. :)

(I also don't like making buttons most of the time. Sometimes I get in a weird "button-making" mood, but it usually evaporates after 10 minutes of fiddling in Photoshop, lol)

[Todd]

Media! Mostly making thumbnails when images are too big for a gallery. It's so tedious, and I hate it.

[Robin]

Media! Mostly making thumbnails when images are too big for a gallery. It's so tedious, and I hate it.

THUMBNAILS...agggghhhhh I'm having flashbacks to 2004 and the ill-fated YGO thumbnail gallery I tried to run... *scrubs eyes*

[dubiousdisc]

Media! Mostly making thumbnails when images are too big for a gallery. It's so tedious, and I hate it.

Do you use any automated thumbnail makers?

[Todd]

No! I wouldn't even know where to begin. My Tidus site runs on Wordpress, and it automatically makes thumbnails for my galleries which is nice. For sites I code manually, though, I make them in Photoshop and it's a pain. If you have suggestions, I'm excited.

[Sarah]

I'd also like to know about that, dubs! I plan on adding screenshot galleries to a couple sites, so that would be really useful. :)

[nyxmidnight]

Me too! I want to make a gallery of fanarts for Nyx's Lounge but UGH THUMBNAILS.

[Larissa]

Two words: photoshop actions. Google is your friend here, there are countless tutorials for this; this is the very first one I found and it's got all of the basics.

I'm sure there are free programs out there that can build thumbnails, too, but Photoshop gives you the most control with it, since you can build an action to do anything you want. You can also use Adobe Bridge to automatically create an entire gallery. I don't do that very often, since the gallery it creates won't look anything like the rest of your site -- here's an example -- but if you've got thousands of caps it's easier than doing it manually.

Personally, I make a Photoshop action for the thumbnail size I want, then use Automate > Batch to pick the action I want, the folder where they're stored, my destination folder, and voila.

(I honestly just linked the first tutorials I found; use Google, there are more than enough tutorials out there to tell you everything you need to know. If you don't have Photoshop, like I said, I'm sure there are websites out there that do this for you. Using Photoshop simply gives you control over the entire process.)

Of course, if you then have trouble coding your gallery, I have a tool for that ;)

[Robin]

Oh wow! I had forgotten all about the batch processing function of Photoshop! That's a good idea--I haven't used that in ages.

(One reason: back on a wayyyyy olddddd version of Photoshop Elements--because I'm too cheap to buy actual Photoshop--I tried using the Batch Process thing and it completely screwed up all the screencaps I was trying to make thumbnails out of. I tried it 3 separate times and it actually changed the original file into a thumbnail rather than making a copy and putting it in a separate folder like I had specified. There was much ARGH, and frantic Undoing, and frustrated throwing of small objects.)

I might need to try this again since I've upgraded my Elements install twice since then, lol~~