Generating a photo gallery on Linux

Looking for a quick way to create a HTML photo gallery on Linux? That’s how I did it.

I have a small child and my wife asked (err tasked me) to create a web site with his pictures. I didn’t want to host his pictures on picasa or flickr, so I used a simple Unix tool to create an HTML gallery and posted it on my on site.

The tool? jigl. Perl-based, command-line and very easy to use. To install on Ubuntu, I just did:

# apt-get install jigl

To create the gallery, you just need to run the command and specify a directory. For example:

$ jigl /home/me/pics/1yo

And it will create the gallery inside /home/me/pics/1yo/web/ . Note that the default theme and options are a bit ugly, so I decided to download the white theme (much better) and ran it with some extra options to reduce the noise from the final HTML:

$ cd /home/me/.jigl/themes/
$ wget http://xome.net/projects/jigl/themes/white-theme.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf white-theme.tar.gz
$ cd /home/me/pics
$ jigl –theme white -it “My babys pics” -noskb -nosxy -nogi 1yo

There is an example of the white theme here: http://xome.net/projects/jigl/themes/white/

Hope you like!

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