Building photo Website from existing hierarchy

[arogge]

I am interested in building a photography gallery based on an existing directory tree, each directory containing compressed JPEG files and arranged into the desired hierarchy. This is what I want a software package to do:

Read directory tree from hard drive.
Read first directory.
Generate thumbnails of predefined width or height, depending on image orientation, and place in first subdirectory.
Generate small versions of original input images, and place in second subdirectory.
Read next level of directory tree and repeat image generation.
Make HTML file with predefined background, header and footer in each directory.
Make links to related album levels based on directory hierarchy.
Prompt for HTML file name, or make name based on final eight characters of directory name.
Prompt for HTML file title and header keywords, or make name based on the characters after final "_" character in directory name or entire name if no "_" character exists.
Image thumbnails will be arranged in a 3xN grid.
The image file names should be placed in the Alternate Text for each thumbnail.
Prompt for representative thumbnail or choose thumbnail not in 3x1 row.
Make or update table-of-contents file containing links to all albums in a tree showing the title of each album.


The basic goal is to make a site like PBase.com without the underlying Oracle database, and to do this automatically and consistently once the directory tree and the JPEG files are placed on the local machine. What software would you recommend that I use for this task?

 

[Ruahrc]

I don't think it's quite as sophisticated as what you're looking for but I found LR to do a pretty goob job with its gallery export feature. You have to make each "page" (each subdirectory in your description) separately (i.e. no recursive generation) and it can't make a good "homepage". I got around that by generating a new gallery with one pic from each subfolder, then just hacking the html file to change the picture links to point to new galleries. But it worked okay for me.

Ruahrc

 

[jabbott]

Check out minishowcase. It can easily handle most of what you want, and it is quite configurable. One difference is that this software goes on your web server, and you just point it to the main folder that contains subfolders of your images. It is remarkably easy to setup, assuming your webserver has a fully configured version of PHP installed. One caveat is that the most recent version of PHP breaks compatibility with minishowcase, so on my server I had to rewrite some of the code to make it work. If you find that you're getting PHP errors, send me a private message and I can send you the modified scripts that will make it work.

Prior to minishowcase, I tried lots of web gallery software and all of them were inferior to it. Minishowcase was by far the most feature-packed free solution. Here is a link to my current web gallery that uses minishowcase.

 

[gnd]

Another open source php based photo gallery is Gallery. It does require mysql on the server though, so it's not really what you're looking for. I'm just mentioning it because it's highly configurable and should be able to do most of what you need. It also supports plugins and themes and has a lot of contributors for those.

 

[flosseR]

ZenPhoto

I use Zenphoto and find it really nice. Sure it requires the mysql database but it is extremely easy to use and to configure. Allows you to lock down galleries and is truly search engine optimized out of the box as well...
Personally I find gallery a little daunting, its awesome but heavy on the configuration side IMHO.
ZenPhoto

 

[arogge]

I'm trying to eliminate the need for MySQL and PHP. I want a platform-independent version of what is now done by Menalto Gallery, and I'd like it to run locally on Mac OS X. I was hoping that there would be some fancy software from Adobe or somebody by now that would do this.

 

[OreoCookie]

Both, Aperture and Lightroom allow you to create photo galleries semi-automatically. I write semi-automatically since you probably want to tweak some things (title, perhaps you want to display more/less EXIF data, etc.).

BTW, MySQL and PHP are platform-independent, so that would actually be a very good solution if platform-independence is important to you.

 

[jabbott]

I tried the Photoshop CS3 gallery feature before and all of its templates were clearly outdated and hard to navigate. I also tried Gallery but it was not to my liking due to requiring MySQL. Minishowcase was the first one I found that worked nicely. It doesn't require MySQL but it does require PHP, which is installed by default on your OS X system already (assuming you are running OS X 10.5 or newer). It wouldn't be that difficult to set up Minishowcase in your /Library/WebServer/Documents folder, if you wanted to run it locally. The archive includes a galleries folder, which you could copy/move your gallery folders into. The first time you load the Minishowcase page, it automatically generates thumbnails and scaled down versions of the images, and stores them to a cache folder so that it runs much faster on subsequent visits. I know that Minishowcase won't eliminate the need for PHP, but there are many image manipulation features in PHP that make using it worthwhile. Anything that is written entirely in HTML won't be able to scale images (before sending to the web browser), create thumbnails and store them to a cache, which would effectively make the gallery slow and bloated.