Picture Infrastructure

January 15th, 2015
blog, pictures, tech
Every year I go back over the pictures I have and put up a selection of them under jefftk.com/pictures. For the first eight years or so this was just a simple list of thumbnails linking to larger versions of the images:
  <a href="family_dinner.jpg">
    <img src="family_dinner-tn.jpg"></a>
  <a href="alex_jeff_alice_rick_music.jpg">
    <img src="alex_jeff_alice_rick_music-tn.jpg"></a>
  <a href="davy_alex.jpg">
    <img src="davy_alex-tn.jpg"></a>
Clicking on a picture, viewing it, and clicking back is kind of annoying, so I added a lightbox view last year. This year I wanted a better experience on my phone, so I rewrote the lightbox code to handle phones. [1]

Over time the thumbnails got bigger and bigger as ideas about acceptable bandwidth have changed:

year height
2005 96px
2006 96px
2007 96px
2008 96px
2009 96px
2010 128px
2011 200px
2012 300px
2013 300px
2014 400px
At this point the 96px thumbnails are awkwardly small, so I've now gone back over all the years to bring thumbnails up to size and add the mobile-suporting changes I had made for 2014. I've also added srcset support for 2x displays:

   sed 's~img src="\([^"]*\)-tn.jpg"~
          img src="\1-tn.jpg"
              srcset="\1-tn.jpg 1x, \1-2x.jpg 2x"~'

(Historical consistency was very helpful here.)


[1] Code is on github.

Comment via: substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Thing of Things AI use policy

dynomight recently wrote an article calling for bloggers to state publicly whether and how they use AI

via Thing of Things July 6, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)