We have just finished of some work for the super talented dwstudios working on the cg visuals section. DW Studios was a exciting project and we wanted to think oustside the box from your standard cms system.

The director of dw studios david wiffen is a very busy guy and when he has lots of work on it can sap his time uploading images writing blog posts etc.

As the broadcast section was powered by vimeo we wanted to make the CG Visuals section powered by flickr. Flickr has a really nice and easy to use interface that david was already accustomed to.

So DW Studios has no admin section and is purely powered by social networks.

So we set about the build hooking into flickrs api using phpflickr sdk. At first we had it set to public but as a requirement from david we worked to allow authentication so private pics can be shown via the sdk.

Image size was our first hurdle to oversome flickr does do some of the work for you resizing a array of images with various dimesions, but unfortunately it wont resize to the specifc size needed to match up with the design 183X106 so we then hade to use antoher caching library to the take the nearest resized image from flickrs api and then cache that image again to 183×106.

This works great but as you can imagine resizing and caching two sets of images dynamically resulted in a long load time for the webpage. We couldnt leave david with this load time as clients may leave the webpage due to the long load which could lose dwstudios work.

So enter another cache after both images are resized and then rendered to the browser we then cache the html so everything is then served from static html files and is lighting fast.

We also built in the functionality for david to be able to send clients to specific images within a set by appending /{image_id} to a set see example below.

http://dwstudio.co.uk/cg-visuals-project.php?flickrid=72157634178733202/1
http://dwstudio.co.uk/cg-visuals-project.php?flickrid=72157634178733202/2

We are really please with the results of the CG Visuals section which you can view here http://dwstudio.co.uk/cg-visuals.php.

Functionality
Powered by flickr
Main collection image can be changed via drag and drop within flickr admin
Private flickr images can be displayed
Image cached to set sizes
Custom image viewer built from scratch
Share functionality for individual images
Cache html for lighting quick load time
Header and description pulled in from flickr api

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