Table of Contents
Curator/HS is a simple script that allows one to generate HTML image galleries with the intent of displaying photographic images on the Web, or for a CD-ROM presentation, or for archiving.
It generates static web pages only - no special configuration or running of scripts are required on the server. The script supports hierarchical directories, thumbnail generation, automatic resizing. Its output leverages the Highslide JS library for a slick design.
It can be templated with a single file fo HTML with simple keywords in them. Running this script only requires a recent Python interpreter and the PIL (Python Imaging Library).
Important
I've rewritten curator on 2011-01-16 to make it use Highslide JS, the result is much simpler and I made other improvements and simplifications along the way. Use curator-hs for an improved experience.
There are many gallery generator on the internet. It seems everyone and their brother has been writing an image gallery generation script these days. Why did I write my own? Most of the existing ones required server customizations (PHP, cgi scripts) and will not work off of a simple archive CDROM, or required some annoying installation of some special image manipulation packages, or didn't support templating. Problems problems problems. I just wanted something simple.
Another way to view the services that this script provides is this:
- it gathers the input files
- optionally, it generates scaled-down versions of the images
- it generates all the thumbnails
- it puts all those contents under a single directory 'gallery' with an HTML index
- all the links are relative, so you should be able archive and serve the files from anywhere
This script was written with the following requirements/goals/features:
- on the client side: nothing more should be required than a web browser to use it;
- on the server side: the web pages should be statically generated (no need for special server configuration, no cgi, no PHP, no Zope, no nonsense, just HTML);
- all links are relative links (i.e. it should work when burned on a CDROM or moved);
- the output HTML should be templated/themeable (i.e. the user can change the look of the output HTML);
- thumbnails should be generated automatically, the thumbnails reside alongside the photos themselves;
- it should be simple to use (it should be able to work with a simple hierarchy of image files, with a trivial invocation, try it now, if it don't work, I've failed);
it should be trivial to install and portable (i.e. should not use more than what is available in base installs of most linux distributions). In this respect, thus this script only depends on the availability of:
- Python, version 2 or more;
- Python Imaging Library (PIL);
There is no special library to install, no special tools, nothing. Download and run. This runs on a default redhat install.
Running the script with the default templates should be as easy as cd'ing in the root of the image hierarchy and typing curator.
Run curator --help for command line interface options, description of the required inputs and of what the script generates.
A Mercurial repository can be found at:
One of the most important "features" of curator is that it does not depend on much to run or to view the pages.
- Python-2.3 or greater;
- PIL (Python Imaging Library);
curator will run under any platform that has a Python2 (or more) interpreter and the ImageMagick tools. It has been tested under Linux and IRIX. curator is known to have worked under Windows using the PIL (tested on 2003-11).
Contributions from other people can be found in the source code.
- Sourceforge Project Page
- Freshmeat Appindex
- Getting Python
- Getting ImageMagick
Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Martin Blais. All Rights Reserved.
This code is distributed under the GNU General Public License;
Martin Blais <blais@furius.ca>