JDGallery is a small Python script generating a number of HTML files from jpeg images that make up a image gallery to browse with any html browser. Inspired by BBGallery
BBGallery was the first tool I ever encountered that counted as Infrastructure as Code. It built customizable file-based image galleries from scratch. It seems to be a dead project; I want to re-create it.
Apparently BBGallery was written by (and named after) Bodo Bauer.
When you ran bbgallery in a folder full of images, it would set about to create thumbnail versions of those
images, followed by creating uniformly scaled versions of them. Then it created an HTML page for
each scaled image. In that page, when you clicked on the scaled image, it would let you directly view / download
the original image. Each scaled HTML page had links forwards and backwards to the scaled HTML pages for the
next and previous scaled images, alphabetically by file name. It also created index HTML pages, each containing
some of the thumbnail images, linked to the appropriate scaled HTML page that corresponds to the thumbnail image.
You could control the size of the thumbnails, the size of the scaled images, and how many thumbnails would appear on each of index pages (it would create nough indexes for all the image thumbnails, with corresponding forward and backwards links on each index, as well) using command line options.
All the thumbnails, scaled images, and HTML files were put in their own sub-directories, so as to not clutter up the main directory.
I appreciated the primary design goal (as I understood it) of BBGallery, which is that it created a way to look at pictures that did not require a tremendous infrastructure to operate or maintain the gallery. It statically created all the files needed for a reasonably useful (according to the standards at the time) gallery.
The fact it operated at the file system level, meant that after you run bbgallery in a directory full of
image files, that that directory became a web-based image gallery that you could tar/compress and move to
another server, you could open the files locally with a browser, you could burn it to a CD-ROM (yeah that was
a thing, once) and consign it to long term storage. It didn't require a particular web server with particular
modules or configuration--just one that did basic HTTP. It created thumb nails and "web optimized" copies of
your photos, but also left you photos intact for archival purposes. A bbgallery-ized folder archived
20 years ago would still be viewable today (although somewhat laugably quaint in its aesthetic style).
Another part of that design I appreciate was that, the first time you created a gallery in an image directory,
it would create a dot file in the directory, and write the configuration information there. That is, when
you ran bbgallery, you may have told it how big to make the thumbnails and scaled images, how many thumbnails
to put on each index page, what to call the gallery, etc. It would record all those command-line flags that you
provided at initial creation into the dotfile. Then, if/when you want to add or remove images to that directory,
you only had to run bbgallery again, all by itself. It would figure out what commands line options were used
previously, and re-use them, updating the gallery with the new or removed images. I would take advantage of this
in various cron-jobs or even when using inotifywait to detect image file changes and automatically update
my galleries.
I intend to re-implement most if not all of these functions. Currently, I do not commit to using the same command-line syntax or having the exact same run time behaviors, but that might change depending on how I feel.
Improvements I intend to make are:
- Support JPG, PNG, GIF, and SVG file types
- To make this harder, also try to only use Python libraries that can be installed via
pip, no shelling out directly to ImageMagick or Gimp
- To make this harder, also try to only use Python libraries that can be installed via
- Support pulling metadata out of the files to make availabe in the gallery view
- Support a more modern dynamic mobile friendly UI that allows flipping through images
- Note that I hate writing javascript, I hate the DOM model for programming, and I hate having to learn and update third-party javascript libraries. So no promises on this one.
Well, I actually used up all my time just writing this up--I didn't even get any skeleton code brought together. I'm not sure when I'll get more time and motiviation to get back to this. Hopefully soon.