Hari's Corner

Do you have a bunch of images/photos in folders in your hard drive that you just want to quickly turn into an album of navigable web pages? And you don't want the hassle of installing a heavyweight PHP/MySQL driven gallery software on your web host simply to put these pictures online or waste time in individually uploading each image to a hosted service like Flickr or Photobucket? If so, this post is for you.

There are a large number of (extremely simple) command line tools in *nix that will do the job of processing folders of images, producing thumbnails and organizing them in a simple, easily navigable website. The output of these gallery generators can be customized using HTML templates, so if you're not satisfied with the default, basic layout of your gallery, you can easily modify the result. The best part is that such albums are completely platform independent and can be hosted on any web server, being nothing more than static HTML files with images in JPG/PNG/GIF format.

I found plenty of them in Debian's repository and I'll share a few of them here.

• BINS - Seems an interesting option for those interested in multiple albums within a single website.
• galrey - I couldn't find a website for this tool, but the package is available in the Debian repositories.
• Photon - Another simple Python script which produces a static album with thumbnails.
• iGal - Another configurable image gallery generator written in Perl.
• kallery - for those who hate the CLI and prefer a "Wizard" style interface to accomplish tasks, this one is a good choice. This is similar to the above command line tools and produces a static HTML album.

There are plenty of simple command line utilities in Linux/*nix like these for other tasks as well. Feel free to explore!