So at work today I was shipping some broken electronics to our service center. Our company recently changed policy on how this done and it now involves a different shipping service. This used to be an easy process, I’d call 1-800 and then answer some computer posed questions. Schedule a pickup, yes, yes, 2 pounds, yes, and it was done. Easy. Easy.

However the new shipper’s computer was having difficulty understanding I had a prepaid label and kept wanting to use the destination address as the pickup, so mercifully it very quickly gave up and transfered me to a human.

Anyway the human and I get to the end of the transaction and she prepares to give me a confirmation number. I ready to jot a long string of alphanumeric gibberish down on my stub of the shipping label. I actually do keep track of these things due to a rather long email chain of “hey you never sent us that thing” I had to endure a few months back.

“Your confirmation number is.. three.”

There is then a longer than expected pause.

I wait.

Okay, maybe she wants me to read it back to her as it’s given to me.

“Three…” I reply expectantly.

There is another longer pause. No other numbers seem to be coming, just silence.

“Is.. that it?” I finally venture.

“Yes,” she answers evenly.

“My confirmation number is just… three?”

Short pause.

“Yep.” She sounds tired, so I don’t want to push it.

“Oookay then… three. Well, uh, thank you for your help” I finish.

“Thank you sir.” The call ends.

Three.

Okay.

I miss the image thumbnail image gallery from my old hand crafted site. It was a nice feature to browse the images and I just plain liked seeing my scribbles in tiny form all laid out next to each other. It was almost like some meta-mosiac thing in it’s self.

The “gallery” link on that top bar has been a mere place holder for a very long time now. Every few months I’ll venture forth and browse the WordPress image and gallery plug-ins and test a few out. But most of them, while nifty sure, just plain fall into a category of “not want I’m looking for.” I’m getting rather tired of looking.

I don’t want any flash or java based pop overlay displays (I have a simple by design display aesthetic going on here and too many of these plug-ins break that.) I don’t want to use Flickr or any image hosting service. I don’t want any captions to be based on filename or date, but definitely need to have the image titles displayed. I don’t want a “slideshow.” I don’t want something for the sidebar. I do not want images resized. I don’t care about EXIF image data.

I’m kind picky for someone who wants free software eh?

Here’s what I would like in a gallery plug in: Twenty or so thumbnail images (I can even make them myself) per page that link directly to the original post containing the image, not the image file, but to the original post. If it can generate these thumbnail pages automatically based on oh.. let’s say which posts have an “image” tag, well that would just be the extra gravy.

Now if I were a better quality of geek, I would learn some proper PHP and come up with my own elegant solution, but… yeah, that’s not going to happen. I know in my head this should be simple, yet the nuts and bolts of it are beyond me.

So for a while now my last resort plan has been to just simply hand craft some linked tables and plop them into a page. However my lazy ass shudders at the thought of having to crank out tables with links for over 200 image posts. I went with WP for the automation and not having to dirty my hands with html anymore right?

But I may not have much choice. So before I give up and dig in with the tables I’m putting out this plea. If any folks have leads on a WordPress plug-in that might fit the needs I’ve outlined above please drop me a line.

One way or another though, the thumbs are comming back.

Maybe. Eventually.