It has only taken us 18 months…
Yes, you read that correctly.
We travelled to Sri Lanka in January and February 2025, and I can finally say:
The photographs are done!
Don’t want to read all the technical waffle? No problem. You can jump straight to the Andysworld! Holiday Photograph Album and select Qatar & Sri Lanka, and/or visit YouTube to watch lots of clips, I rendered into a 32 minute video, just in case your tempted to visit Sri Lanka!
Youtube video is here –
After more than a year of sitting on the original collection, sorting through photographs, removing the rubbish, organising everything, converting file formats, writing scripts and re-coding the website album, the Sri Lanka 2025 photographs are finally ready and published on Andysworld!
And it turns out that getting a holiday photo album published is considerably more complicated than simply clicking the “Upload” button.
1,500+ Photographs and Videos
When we came home from Sri Lanka, we had managed to accumulate more than 1,500 photographs and videos.
And all of them were taken using just two phones:
- iPhone 8
- iPhone 13 Pro Max
No SLR.
No DSLR.
No expensive lenses.
No professional photography equipment.
Just two iPhones.
And between them, they managed to capture more than 1,500 photographs and videos during our Sri Lankan adventure.
Looking back through them, I’m genuinely impressed by just how good some of the photographs are.
Of course, not all of them made the final cut.
In fact, the original collection of more than 1,500 eventually became a much more manageable collection of around 1,000 photographs to work through.
First Stop – iCloud
The first challenge was simply getting everything together.
The photographs had been taken on two different iPhones and stored in iCloud, so the first job was to download the complete collection.
From there, everything was moved onto our Synology NAS, giving us a proper local copy of the photographs and videos.
That gave us somewhere sensible to work from and, importantly, somewhere to keep the original collection safely stored.
Synology Photos
Once everything was on the NAS, the photographs were loaded into Synology Photos.
This is where the serious sorting began.
Lindsey worked through the collection and organised the photographs by location, while at the same time identifying the photographs that simply weren’t worth keeping.
And there were plenty of those.
- Duplicates
- Blurry photographs
- Accidental photographs
- People blinking
- People looking the wrong way
- Photographs that were almost identical
- Photographs where we still don’t know why we took them
And then there was the wildlife.
If an elephant moves its trunk slightly, that’s obviously a completely different photograph.
Apparently.
At one point we had an impressive collection of photographs of essentially the same elephant.
Eventually, the great Sri Lankan photograph cull was complete.
What remained was our definitive collection.
Then I Had To Download Them Again!
With the final collection selected, the photographs were downloaded from the Synology onto a PC for the final preparation.
And this is where things got a little more technical.
The iPhones had produced photographs in HEIC format.
For Andysworld, I wanted standard JPG files.
So the next step was:
HEIC -> JPG
But that wasn’t enough.
I also wanted a consistent file naming convention.
That meant dealing with the various possible file extensions:
.HEIC
.JPEG
.jpeg
.JPG
.jpgEverything needed to end up as:
.jpg
And the filenames themselves needed to be lowercase.
So something like:
SriLanka-IMG_1234.JPEGbecame:
srilanka-img_1234.jpgPowerShell and Python To The Rescue
There was absolutely no way I was going to manually rename hundreds of photographs.
That’s what scripting is for.
I used a combination of PowerShell and Python to automate the repetitive parts of the process.
The scripts handled the file preparation, including:
- Converting HEIC photographs to JPG
- Renaming JPEG files
- Standardising file extensions
- Converting filenames to lowercase
- Applying a consistent naming convention
- Preparing the final collection for the website
It’s a simple rule:
If you have to do something hundreds of times, write a script.
And Finally – Andysworld
With the photographs finally sorted, culled, converted and renamed, there was one final job.
Build the album.
These photographs aren’t simply being dumped into a generic photo-sharing service.
They’re being added to the custom album system on Andysworld.
That meant going back into the code and creating the Sri Lanka 2025 album.
The photographs had to be incorporated into the various locations, the album structure had to be created, and the website code had to be updated.
Then came the testing.
- Check the thumbnails
- Check the full-size photographs
- Check the navigation
- Check the location structure
- Check the album layout
- Check everything works on different devices
And finally…
Upload everything to Andysworld.
Why Go To All This Trouble?
Why not just upload the photographs to Facebook, Google Photos or one of the many other photo-sharing services?
Because that’s not really what I wanted.
These are our memories of a fantastic trip, and I wanted to create a proper photographic record that we could come back to in the future.
The Synology gives us the local archive.
Synology Photos gives us the organisation and sorting.
Lindsey helped turn more than 1,500 photographs into a definitive collection.
PowerShell and Python dealt with the repetitive technical work.
And Andysworld gives me complete control over the final album.
It was considerably more work than simply uploading a few photographs.
But it’s also considerably more satisfying.
18 Months Later…
The trip itself lasted a few weeks.
The photographs took seconds to capture.
Getting them ready for publication took considerably longer.
But finally, 18 months later, the job is done.
More than 1,500 photographs and videos have been downloaded, sorted, culled, organised, converted and processed.
The rubbish has gone.
The good photographs have survived.
The filenames are lowercase.
The HEIC files have become JPGs.
The custom album has been coded.
And the finished collection is now sitting on Andysworld.
So, after all this time…
Welcome Back To Sri Lanka!
The Sri Lanka 2025 photographs are finally ready.
And yes, somewhere in that collection there are still probably more photographs of elephants than anyone really needs.
But that’s what holidays are all about.
Memories, photographs, stories…
…and occasionally taking the same photograph twenty times because the elephant moved its trunk.
Sri Lanka 2025 – finally finished, finally published, and finally ready to enjoy.
Welcome to our Sri Lanka 2025 photo album on Andysworld!
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