Mauvesoft Web Script Archive

Mauvesoft Gallery

A PHP script for browsing a hierarchy of image directories. The power of this script lies in its flexibility. While it provides caching for performance, thumbnailing is done on-demand, which means that it is trivial to get external applications to integrate with it.

Requirements

• ImageMagick or PHP's built-in GD.
• PHP 4.0.6 or later.

Features

• On-demand thumbnailing of PNG and JPEG images (thumbnails are always JPEG though).
• Provides client-server caching and compression.
• Intelligent caching of generated thumbnails: thumbnails are updated if the image, scripts or config files change.
• Always provides a live view of the filesystem.
• Image captions and titles are in a tab-seperated file; very quick to caption large albums.
• An HTML description can be included in each album.
• Themeable through images and stylesheets.
• Uses no proprietary interfaces/file formats.
• Integrates trivially with other software.
• Uses clean URLs.
• Initial support for embedding in other scripts.
• Doesn't modify original images. Full-size images can be linked if desired.
• Stylish, uncluttered output.
• Produces W3C compliant XHTML and CSS.
• Runs on PHP as old as 4.0.6

Notes

The goal of the Mauvesoft Gallery is to be as simple as possible to configure and use, while leveraging the power of the underlying operating system. For example, you may be able to configure an FTP server to provide different access permissions to different people, so allowing different people to manage different albums. You can use symbolic links on POSIX operating systems to provide more complex systems of sub-albums. You could get a webcam to export grabs directly to your albums.

Albums are simply directories, and can be titled with any characters supported by the filesystem. Captions and image order are provided from a simple tab-seperated file that could be created automatically (even with echo) or with a text editor. Each album can contain an HTML introduction in another file. You are not forced to do things through a slow web-based interface; use whatever tools are available on your server.

One of the other advantages of Mauvesoft Gallery over some other pieces of software is that it is significantly smaller and less complex internally, so it is easier to modify the script if you know PHP. Features such as voting or image popularity counts have been omitted as untidy and unduly complex.

Demo

View a demo of Mauvesoft Gallery.

Bugs

• Tested on Apache under GNU/Linux and Windows XP; should work on other webservers; should work on other OSes but the search path for ImageMagick would have to be changed.
• Server thumbnail cache doesn't know about symlinks and will duplicate the thumbnails when it encounters them, so it will use more diskspace than is necessary.

Download and Installation

1. Download Mauvesoft Gallery v1.5.1 (.tar.gz, 67KB)
2. Unpack with tar -xzf gallery-1.5.1.tar.gz (Under Windows, WinRAR can open .tar.gz archives)
3. Move the source directory somewhere else.
4. Create albums by copying or symlinking images or directories into the 'Albums' subdirectory.

Mauvesoft Gallery should work out of the box. If not:

5. Check that the .thumbs directory exists and is writeable by PHP.
6. Edit config.php. Check that the search path to ImageMagick is correct. If you prefer not to use ImageMagick, uncomment $resize_engine='gd'; and comment $resize_engine='imagemagick';

Creating Caption Files

Caption files are tab-seperated files in each directory (by default named image_index.txt) with one image per line, in the format ([] denote optional sections):

<filename>[<one or more tabs><title>[<one or more tabs><caption>]]

Additionally, the order of the captions in the file will determine the order of the images displayed in the gallery.

Changelog since version 1.1.3

• Feature: PHP-based templates
• Feature: Watermarking of thumbnails
• Theme: New theme 'corporate'
• Theme: 'slides' rewritten in XHTML and CSS
• Fix: Thumbnail transparent PNGs with GD
• Fix: .JPG extensions not considered images
• Fix: Directory names containing '+' character
• Fix: Imagemagick engine doesn't work with CMYK JPEGs

Changelog since version 1.1.2

• Fix: Minor compatibility changes to support more restrictive PHP configurations
• Fix: Automatic creation of thumbnail subdirectories.

Contact

Email me at mauve@mauveweb.co.uk to report bugs, request features, etc.