Hari's Corner

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Static image gallery generators

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 09:28 IST (last updated: Thu, May 7, 2009 @ 21:13 IST)

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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.

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

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4 comment(s)

  1. You might be interested in ImageMagick, it's a command line editing and resizing program that handles batch operations and runs nicely under Windows. Doesn't create the album, but it will take you most of the way there.

    Comment by Troy (visitor) on Mon, Mar 10, 2008 @ 16:48 IST #
  2. Most of these tools use ImageMagick in the back end. Yes, ImageMagick is a good utility library used by many *nix scripts. :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Mon, Mar 10, 2008 @ 16:56 IST #
  3. Thanks for clarifying that hari. It makes me much more likely to actually download a piece of software when I know how it works :).

    Comment by Troy (visitor) on Tue, Mar 11, 2008 @ 02:56 IST #
  4. Troy, a good reason to use these command line image gallery generating tools is when you have thousands of photos in several folders and want to turn them into an easily navigable, thumbnailed index of web pages.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Mar 11, 2008 @ 09:17 IST #

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