Free Web Gallery Software
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If you’re a Mac user who wants to create web-based galleries of your digital photos, then you’ll want to take a look at Gallery Monger, my free app that can create complete web-based image galleries from folders, iPhoto libraries or iView MediaPro catalogs. Similarly, if you’re an AppleScript programmer, you might want to take a look at the enclosed article for more info on Image Events, OS X’s built-in graphics processing library. |
A few months ago, I posted this article which details the process that I use to create the web galleries that are displayed in the Gallery section of this site. As you can see in the article, my technique is based around iView Multimedia’s MediaPro 2.6 application, an excellent image cataloging program that has robust HTML export facilities. MediaPro works great for web gallery output and offers all of the other advantages of a fine cataloging program. If you don’t want to spend $200 on a copy of MediaPro, though, you can always make do with coding pages by hand, or by using Photoshop or iPhoto’s HTML export features. Coding by hand is obviously labor-intensive, while both Photoshop and iPhoto provide little in the way of customization of their HTML galleries.
To provide a lower-cost (read “free”) alternative to MediaPro, I wrote Gallery Monger, a stand-alone app that can turn folders of images (or selections from an iPhoto catalog) into a finished web gallery. Gallery Monger is template-based, so you can easily edit the existing templates or create your own. MediaPro still scores over Gallery Monger with its thorough support for EXIF metadata, so if you want to display image stats, Gallery Monger won’t be able to extract that information for you. For quickly creating a nice-looking gallery, though, this software may be just what you need. Gallery Monger requires Mac OS X version 10.3 or later. Documentation is included with the download.
Update
The first version of this that I posted included iView MediaPro support. Unfortunately, I just discovered a couple of bugs in my Media Pro code, so I’ve temporarily taken it out. The currently posted version (.93) can make galleries from iPhoto, and Finder folders, but not iView MediaPro. I’ll put MediaPro support back in soon.
About the Code
I wrote Gallery Monger entirely in AppleScript using AppleScript Studio, part of Apple’s free XCode development tools. Gallery Monger does not rely on any third-party applications for its graphics processing. Instead, it uses the Image Events routines that are built-in to Mac OS X version 10.3. Image Events are a simple suite of graphics processing commands and functions that allow you to scale, crop, pad, rotate and flip images, in addition to reading their bit depth, resolution, dimensions and file format. Image Events can read from a number of different file formats.
To learn more about Image Events, check out this article.
For digital photographers who want to create automated production workflows, Image Events is a great tool, and I’ll be covering it in more detail in future articles on this site.
Comments
7 Comments on Free Web Gallery Software
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Jim Ault on
Tue, 4th Jan 2005 3:11 pm
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Kevin Meaney on
Wed, 2nd Mar 2005 9:16 am
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Martin J on
Sat, 26th Mar 2005 9:22 pm
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Paul on
Thu, 25th Aug 2005 6:39 am
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Tedd on
Sat, 27th Aug 2005 4:26 am
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fiddlin' on
Sun, 12th Mar 2006 6:10 pm
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drive recovery on
Thu, 18th Dec 2008 11:50 pm
Great topic. Good that you are hitting the automation challenge. I am doing some web development tool building and plan to include AppleScript and Photoshop in the next few wieeks. Look forward to your next articles! (4 years ago I used Hypercard, Applescript, Frontier, and Fetch to build and upload an entire site of 240 pages.. one click and it took about 20 minutes, most of which was upload time)
I am the author of a freeware tool for AppleScript called iMagine Photo. It is like a highly extended Image Events. iMagine Photo can return a much larger range of metadata than Image Events including a lot of exif data and iMagine Photo can also write exif data, it can do all this without having to render the image which makes it very quick. It also has the ability to add text to your images or apply watermarks, blend images plus other drawing commands. To checkout most of the functionality of iMagine Photo, see its on-line documentation: http://www.yvs.eu.com/documentation/
Thought that little app might just be what I was looking for. Especially the “add link to full size image” option sounds great. But whenever I try to generate a catalogue file with the “Include links to full-size files” option enabled, Gallery Monger stops after processing all the images with a Apple Script Error “can’t find
(OSX 10.3.8)
Nice blog.I read some of you’re articles and they are really good.
It’s really a good software.I am a multimedia student so this software can help me.
This is a very nice, simple photo gallery app. but I have some browser compatibility problems with the display: in Firefox the “prev” and “next” menus shift place – in Explorer the the images open in a window that is too small at the bottom. These issues in the css templates should be corrected – unfortunatly we’re not all on macs so we still have to put up with people using these browsers. Otherwise this a great little cocoa application which just needs some fine tuning.
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