Cute Little Image Gallery Script (CLIGS)

Introduction

The Cute Little Image Gallery Script (CLIGS) is a PHP script that autogenerates a nice html index for a directory full of jpeg images. CLIGS (c) Copyright 2005 John Leach and is licensed under the terms of the Gnu Public License version 2.

If you like CLIGS and/or have any suggestions feel free to e-mail and tell me about it.

Features

• Scales all the images to useful sizes on the fly
• Uses an on-disk cache to relieve load on the server
• Custom logo overlay
• Reads image metadata generated by gthumb
• Reads image metadata from EXIF headers.
• Simple XML gallery metadata
• Sports tidy and compliant HTML
• Entirely configurable using stylesheets.

See an example gallery to see what it can do.

Requirements

CLIGS needs the following stuff to work:

• PHP 4
• Probably Apache
• The PHP Pear modules HTML_Common and HTML_Page2. (see below for more help)
• PHP support for the GD2 graphics library
• PHP support for the EXIF library
• A directory writable by the web server (for resized image caching)
• Ability to configure Apache URL rewriting

Download

Get the latest version of the script from the downloads directory

Cligs v2 is currently in beta testing. Take a look over on the wiki.

Installation

For help getting the requirements, see below

1. copy the cligs.php script, the up.png image and the cligs.css stylesheet into your web root. Let's say /home/john/www is the web root.
2. If your webroot does not appear at the domain root (for example, perhaps you share web hosting and it appears in a subdirectory) you need to edit the variable $base pointing at the subdirectory. E.g: your url is http://www.example.com/users/john/, set the variable to "/users/john"
3. make a directory in your webroot where you'll be storing your images and sub-galleries. Let's say gallery/.
4. Setup Apache URL rewriting:

   <Directory /home/john/www>
   	RewriteEngine On
   	RewriteBase /
   	RewriteRule ^gallery/.*$ /cligs.php
   <Directory>
    

5. make a directory in your webroot called thumbcache/ which is writable to by the user Apache runs as. In my case the directory looks like this:

   drwxrwx---  91 john www-data 4.9K Mar 10 22:25 thumbcache

6. upload your images to the gallery/ directory. Any sub-directories will be listed as sub galleries. If you've used gthumb to create metadata, ensure the .comments/ directory is uploaded (you'll need a recent version (2.6 onwards?) of gthumb to create this).
7. Optionally write an xml file for each gallery (directory) called gallery.xml, specifying a gallery title, description etc. and optionally the full path to a png file containing a logo to overlay in the top left corner, an image to use as the icon, and some text to use as a footer:

   <gallery>
   	<title>My holiday in Italy</title>
   	<description>Photos from holiday in Venice, Italy.</description>
   	<author>John Leach</author>
   	<date>December 2005</date>
   	<logo>/home/john/www/overlay-logo.png</logo>
   	<icon>Image18.jpg</icon>
   	<footer>All the photos are belong to me</footer>
   </gallery>

   If you don't specify an icon, a random one is chose each time.
8. Go view your cute little gallery

Requirements installation

I'm just going to cover Fedora and Debian here. It should be enough to help you with other distros. If you're compiling from source, then you're on your own.

GD support for PHP

On Fedora this is available from the php-gd rpm. On Debian it's called php4-gd.

PHP Pear

Get the base PHP Pear installed first. On Fedora this is available from the rpm named php-pear. On Debian it's called php4-pear.

Now you can use the pear command line to install the HTML_Page2 module. It seems this module is still in development, so you need to tell Pear you're happy installing devel modules:

pear config-set preferred_state devel

pear install HTML_Page2

Limitations / Bugs

• Image or directory filenames with characters that need to be HTTP encoded (other than spaces) won't work. This is currently due to laziness on my part. I'll fix this soon I'm sure.
• Depending on your apache setup, you might not be able to delete the image cache yourself. I'll need to implement this feature in the script at some point I guess.

TODO

• Don't create duplicate thumbs for symlinked directories and images
• Follow freedesktop thumbnail standard? (md5 has of file path etc.
• Configuration image size for icon, thumb and view sizes.
• Multi-lingual url support
• Manual cache deletion
• Support for gthumb Catalogues?
• Other metadata support? Requests via e-mail.
• Up front batch generation of all thumbs

Back

to johnleach.co.uk

$Id: index.html 229 2005-06-18 13:34:26Z john $