SGallery

The completely static Web image gallery system

Introduction

First of all: the white-on-black page is supposed to scare you. This is neither "drag and drop" nor "plug and play" thing. There are few things to learn, config files to be written, you might need some additional software, etc. This is probably UNIX-only (or at least quite difficult to make it run under Windows). If you are looking for something that will "just work" and don't care that much about the details - it might not be what you want (however it might work for you). If you are a geek that likes the command-line, file-driven kind of stuff - read on :)

What we've got here is a Perl script. It requires:

It works in the following fashion:

If you would like to see some real-life examples, you can visit my website: http://photosite.pl, or the galleries of my friends that use this script:

Quick start

Please unpack the sgallery-examples tarfile. In the source/ subdirectory there are source images (cross-linked, to save space) and the three sample gallery hierarchies. In the result/ subdirectory, you will find the outputs of the script.

Example 1

Look in the example1. This could be more or less what you could have in your photo archive. Directories, possibly with some meaningful names (like 'Gallery #1'), inside them some photos etc. That's just fine for SGallery - except that the result will be a bit.. hmm, boring at least. Point your browser to the result/example1/index.html to see what I mean.

Example 2

Please go to example2. Some improvements here:

Example 3

It demonstrates some other tricks that you can use in the album.dat file

That's basically just to get you going. I will not provide more examples, you should be able to figure out the things using the tag reference below.


LOCAL_ and non-LOCAL_

Before you start to dig the tags: sometimes you will find some parameters that have two versions. Let's take LOCAL_THUMB_SIZE and THUMB_SIZE as an example. The rule are following: The idea behind such approach is the following: Imagine that one of your albums is a gallery from the music festival (look here to see one). You would like to have four sub-galleries, from different parts of the concert, with big thumbnails on the main page and 2x2 layout. However, inside the sub-galleries, you'd prefer to keep the consistent 4 columns layout, with relatively small thumbnails. What you do? In the main festival gallery you specify:


Tag reference

# ...Line beginning with # is treated as a comment and ignored
TITLE: stringTitle of the gallery. You can use some basic HTML tags here (fonts, colours etc. Just be reasonable - the script will not prevent you from wrecking the generated HTML by including some "'s and <'s in the wrong place. Use the HTML &something; codes when neccessary.
DATE: stringWhat you want to put in the top-right corner. Note that some reasonable defaults are used, like the EXIF info or the directory creation time. What's more, if you try to specify manually some date and there will be image newer than this date in the album - its date will be used
BREAK: stringSpacer between groups of images
ABOUT: stringFile to put in the "about the author" link on the bottom of each page. This works a bit like the CSS tag below, in a sense that it's inherited by all the sub-levels (however, there is just one file that can be put there).
RSS_BASE: urlIf specified, causes the RSS to be generated, with the given URL (needs to be complete, http://...) as a base. Remember that you have to add the leaf option tags to every album that you want to be visible in the RSS!
CSS: filename
LOCAL_CSS: filename
CSS file to use. You just need to put them in the same directory as album.dat, the HTML links will be arranged properly. Note that the style sheets are really 'cascading' - this means, that if you've had some CSS tags on the upper levels of your hierarchy, the HTML links to them will be generated.
HIGHLIGHT: filenameBy default, the thumbnail of a gallery is generated from the first image on a page. Here you can specify another one
COLUMNS: number
LOCAL_COLUMNS: number
Number of columns on page
TABLE_WIDTH: numberWhat to put as "width" in HTML
IMAGE_SIZE: NNNxNNN
LOCAL_IMAGE_SIZE: NNNXNNN
Full size image resolution
ALBUM_SIZE: NNNxNNN
LOCAL_ALBUM_SIZE: NNNXNNN
Resolution for thumbnails of the albums
THUMB_SIZE: NNNxNNN
LOCAL_THUMB_SIZE: NNNXNNN
Resolution for thumbnails of the images
META_KEYWORDS: string
LOCAL_META_KEYWORDS: string
Strings to put in the HTML header. Name of the gallery and the upper-level galleries are always included.
UNSHARP: geometryOptional Unsharp Mask (ImageMagick syntax)
GAMMA: floatOptional gamma conversion
IMAGE_QUALITY: integerJPG quality for big images
THUMB_QUALITY: integerJPG quality for album/image thumbnails
OPTIONS: option, option, ...Triggers for options. Currently recognized:
  • noexif - disable display of the EXIF information (default)
  • exif - enable display of the EXIF information
  • noconv - disable conversion of the big images (they will be copied directly)
  • conv - enable conversion of the big images (default)
  • hidden - this album will not show up in the upper-level album lists
  • leaf - add this album to RSS
LENS: XX-YY descriptionDefine a lens for the EXIF recognition. The script can often detect the zoom range of the lens, but not the exact model - it's a way to help it. The best practice is to put all your lenses in the main album.dat of the gallery
FOOTER: numberText for the bottom line of the page
+maskInclude all the files/directories that match the mask (unix shell regexp)
stringEverything else is treated as the dirname/filename to include


Misc. notes

EXIF and lens info

EXIF tags are analyzed using the Perl library, some tricks are used to make the display look good, depending on how much information the camera provides. However, in order to reliably detect the lens used, some heuristics is needed. Hints for the heuristics is provided using the LENS tag in the configuration file.

Image cache

During the generation of thumbnails/images, the script generates (and maintains) some additional metatada, stored in the target directory, to avoid repetitive conversion of the same images. However, this mechanism is not perfect. Once in a while it's a good idea to regenerate all the gallery from scratch.

HTML

While the CSS files are customizable, the generated HTML is not. It's created entirely from Perl and I don't plan to implement any templates in a near future.

Speed

The main bottleneck is the creation of images/thumbnails. On my Athlon64 3800+ X2, regenerating my complete gallery (source: 3.2GB, result: 600MB) takes around 2 hours.

TODO



Download

To see the available releases, go to the download page on SourceForge.

Changes


- CVS version
- Version 0.7
- Version 0.6
- Version 0.5
- Version 0.4
- Version 0.3
- Version 0.2
- Version 0.1


(C) 2006 Daniel Rychcik
(muflon /at/ photosite /dot/ pl)