fgallery: a modern, minimalist javascript photo gallery

"fgallery" is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. "fgallery" shows your photos, and nothing else.

You can see an example gallery at the following address:

http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/fgallery/demo/

There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser.

• Automatically orients pictures without fuss and quality loss.
• Multi-camera friendly: automatically sorts pictures by time: just throw your (and your friends) photos and movies in a directory. The resulting gallery shows the pictures in seamless shooting order.
• Adapts to the current screen size and proportions, switching from horizontal/vertical layout and scaling thumbnails automatically.
• Supports face detection for improved thumbnail centering.
• Loads fast! Especially over slow connections.
• Includes original (raw) pictures in a zip file for downloading.
• Panoramas can be seen full-size by default.

Usage

1. Generate all the static files with ./fgallery:

   ./fgallery photo-dir my-gallery

2. Upload "my-gallery" somewhere.

You actually need a web server to test the gallery locally (only due to AJAX/browser restrictions). If you have python installed, a quick way to test the gallery locally is to run:

cd my-gallery
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

and then open http://localhost:8000 with a browser.

Usage notes

The images as shown by the viewer are scaled/compressed using the specified quality to reduce viewing lag. They are also stripped of any EXIF tag. However, the pictures in the generated zip album are preserved unchanged.

Lossless auto-rotation is applied so that images can be opened with a browser directly. JPEG and PNG files are also re-optimized (losslessy) before being archived to furthermore save space.

All images can be included to be viewed individually at full resolution in the gallery by using the -i flag. Panoramas are automatically detected and the original image is included in full-size by default, as often the image preview alone doesn't give it justice.

For best results when shooting with multiple cameras (or friends), synchronize the camera clocks before starting to take pictures. Just pick one camera's time as the reference. By doing this the album is automatically shown in logical shooting order instead of file-name order.

Never use the -s or -d flags. Let your friends and viewers download the raw album at full resolution, not the downscaled crap. Don't make me angry.

Tuning thumbnail generation

The sizes of the thumbnails and the main image can be customized on the command line with the appropriate flags. Two settings are available for the thumbnail sizes: minimum (150x112) and maximum (267x200). Thumbnails will always be as big as the minimum size, but they can be enlarged up to the specified maximum depending on the screen orientation. The default settings are tuned for a mostly-landscape gallery, but they can be changed as needed.

Images having a different aspect ratio (like panoramas) are cut and centered instead of being scaled-to-fit, so that the thumbnail shows the central subject of the image instead of a thin, unwatchable strip. When this happens, the viewer shows a sign on the thumbnail along the cut edges (this effect can be seen in the demo gallery).

Portraits and face detection

To simply favor photos shot in portrait format, invert the width/height of the thumbnail sizes:

./fgallery --min-thumb 112x150 --max-thumb 200x267 ...

This will force the thumbnails to always fit vertically, at the expense of a higher horizontal thumbnail strip.

If your photos are mixed and can contain people, faces or portraits, you can enable face detection by using the -f flag and installing facedetect.

Face detection will ensure that the thumbnails, especially when cut, will be centered on the face of the subject. If face detection is enabled, there's generally no need to increase the thumbnail size.

Dependencies

Frontend/viewer: none (static html/js/css)

Backend:

• ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org)
• Either:
  • exiftran (part of fbida: http://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/), or
  • exifautotran (part of libjpeg-progs: http://libjpeg.sourceforge.net/).
• zip
• perl >= 5.14, with the following additional recommended modules:
  • JSON::XS (libjson-xs-perl)

The following is optional, but used when installed:

• jpegoptim (http://www.kokkonen.net/tjko/projects.html)
• pngcrush (http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/)
• facedetect (http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/hacks/facedetect/)
• p7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/)

On Debian/Ubuntu, you can install all the required dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick exiftran zip libjson-xs-perl

To save more space in the generated galleries, we recommend installing also the optional dependencies:

sudo apt-get install jpegoptim pngcrush

For face detection support, simply follow the facedetect installation instructions.

For performance reasons, we recommend installing also p7zip which is considerably faster during compression thanks to multi-threading support:

sudo apt-get install p7zip

On a Mac, we recommend installing the dependencies using MacPorts. After installing MacPorts, type:

sudo port install imagemagick exiftran jpegoptim pngcrush
sudo cpan -i JSON::XS

Installation

Installation is currently optional. If needed, copy the extracted directory to a directory of your liking and link fgallery appropriately:

sudo cp -r fgallery-X.Y /usr/local/share/fgallery
sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/fgallery/fgallery /usr/local/bin

Authors and Copyright

"fgallery" can be found at http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/fgallery/

"fgallery" is distributed under GPL2 (see COPYING) WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. Copyright(c) 2011-2014 by wave++ "Yuri D'Elia" <wavexx@thregr.org>. fgallery's GIT repository is publicly accessible at:

git://src.thregr.org/fgallery

Extending fgallery

"fgallery" is composed of a backend (the "fgallery" script) and a viewer (contained in the "view" directory). Both are distributed as one package, but they are designed to be used also independently.

"fgallery" just cares about generating the image previews and the album data. All the presentation logic however is inside the viewer.

It's relatively easy to generate the album data dynamically and just use the viewer. This was my aim when I started to develop "fgallery", as it's much easier to just modify an existing CMS instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. All a backend has to do is provide a valid "data.json" at some prefixed address. A plugin for a CMS such as Gallery should be very easy to implement.

TODO

• Handle videos too
• Add an "overview" mode, which shows a screenful of thumbnails.
• Allow to hide the thumbnails entirely.
• Improve EXIF/header display.