The Min-wee Autogallery

Rumblings

This is an old hack, which has gone through more versions than I want to think about. It was originally designed as a cgi program to produce a pretty index for a directory full of images, but was later converted to create the index page and thumbnails ahead of time.

The autogallery script, in one version or another, was used to build all of the galleries on this site. In its current form, the same gallery.pl will build galleries with large thumbnails and long descriptions, small tightly packed thumbnails, multiple page galleries, pages with links directly to each image or to seperate pages for each image with forward and backward links. All of the HTML source is specified by the user at run time, so there is a lot of flexibility in the program.

Requirements

The gallery itself is written in Perl, so a perl interpreter is required. All of the image manipulation is done using external programs, so it is recommended that you also have a recent version of netpbm and the JPEG tools (djpeg, cjpeg) available.

Running

The easiest way to build a gallery is to go into a directory with images in it and run gallery.pl. This will create the necessary thumbnails, some "info" files and one or more HTML gallery files to tie it all together. Easy enough, no?

If you want a bit more control over the way the gallery looks (The default settings are pretty lame), then you can create a "gallery.list" file in the same directory. This allows you to override all of the program parameters, such as gallery title, layout of images, use of headers and footers and so on.

I would incude a complete list of available parameters here, but I don't have a final list of them. For now, you can look at the source code to see what parameters are used there.

Receiving

The source code can be found here or as plain text. A sample configuration file is also provided. There is no real documentation, just the sample config. Sorry.

Rants

Got a problem? Well, how much did you pay for the tickets?

I maintain this program in my spare time for my own use. If you have any comments on how to improve this, or (gasp!) locate a bug, please feel free to email me with the details.

midnight@neverwhen.net