Wrong Way is an ongoing photography project of signage from around the world. It is also an experiment in mass photograph organising, as well as some geeky technical things.

The start point was 2,500 photos that needed organising and classifying, resizing, thumbnail generation, naming and tagging. I wanted to produce a system that could do this all via a content manager.

The photos were uploaded en masse via FTP, and then a single button scans the folder and resizes the images and thumbnails. It took less than ten minutes to do the whole lot (whilst I was doing other things).

The site basically organises the photos by tags. This means that only one actual gallery is needed to hold all the images. However, for us humans, I arranged them into smaller descriptive galleries.

The images were then named where necessary and descriptive tags were added. Once this was done, it becomes a simple task to add images to posts.

When a new post is made, tags can be added to that. If they correlate with tags on the images, they will display on the post automatically. The site is set to only show 9 related images in a set. This is because some tags have several hundred images!

As I wanted to make the system as simple as possible, I built in automatic image resizing for the posts. The new image is uploaded once and the server resizes and adds it to the correct place on the page. It is a perfect way to post – without even having to add any text to the post.

New posts feature a road cone above the thumbnail. The road cone lasts 7 days to show that the item is new.

Other features include cross posting capability to Facebook and Twitter. It’s just a geek experiment and I won’t go into details!

Hopefully the most entertaining thing about the site is the content itself: 2,500 (and growing) images of signs from around world!

www.wrongway.co.uk