Replacing ‘imageindex’ with my own software: part 2

Over the weekend, I finished the first pass at ‘mcphotoweb’. It generates basic photo albums. On the web server side, I’m using javascript to expand the medium-sized images from the thumbs and the full-size images from the medium-sized images. It works, and the presentation is nicer than what ‘imageindex’ produced. The javascript is hackish, but it works. For an example, see my August 30, 2007 album from the 2007 BMW Z Homecoming.

The next round will probably emit XML files with more meta-information, which will enable some of the EXIF details of photos to be shown.

Replacing ‘imageindex’ with my own software

I’ve grown somewhat tired of ‘imageindex’. It doesn’t do what I want without modifying my ~/.imageindexrc file each time, which is annoying. I modified it to permit reading in a separate configuration, but the perl code is spaghetti and I don’t like the structure of the index file (tables… ugh!). I also want output that fits into my site’s style.

There are options other than imageindex, but I haven’t found any that work exactly as I’d like. It’s particularly important that I be able to easily bring in galleries from my old web site, and I can’t do that with Gallery3 or any of the freely available generators I’ve found while also fitting into my site’s style.

I’m almost done with a replacement written in C++, using the GraphicsMagick library. It’s smart enough to avoid unnecessary image regeneration, and automatically recurses into subdirectories to generate ‘medium’ images, thumbnails and montages. It also generates an index.php with all of the thumbnails and subdirectory montages as links. I need to decide how I want to display the medium images (via a slide file or via javascript) and how I want to link to the full-size image from the medium image.