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Writing some photo gallery software

Kristina and I just bought a digital camera. It’s not a wonderful one, but it’s a pretty nice Canon PowerShot A75. Good enough resolution, takes the ubiquitous AA batteries and stores the photos on Compact Flash cards, which are nice and cheap. However, there is a problem. We’d like to put up a photo gallery, but most everyone uses Gallery, which I’m not too huge of a fan of. So I’ve started to hack together my own in Python (of course) using PIL for some of the manipulations.

I haven’t made a lot of the decisions yet, like whether or not to make it use a database backend, but I have mad some design decisions and gotten it going to a small extent.

  • The urls should contain most of the information rather than having it on the hook. This is a lot like the way that PyBloxsom works. This means that for a thumbnail of an image we use galley.py/thumbnail/IMG_0004.JPG instead of gallery.py?img=IMG_0004.JPG&op=thumbnail.

  • Wherever possible, it should be possible to annotate the images. I really like the way that w3photo uses fotonotes to anootate the photos. I’m gonna implement something like this.

  • As much formatting as possible should be done outside the CGI script. This probably means that once again it’s gonna spit out XML which will be translated using XSLT.

  • On the fly resizing is a must. This is already done with the thumbnails, but it should be available for other sizes too, as not everyone (or anyone basically) can view a 3 megapixel image on a screen, especially me with my 1.4 megapixel laptop screen.

  • I’d like to make the software modular as possible and make it possible for other people to use the software. This means that I don’t want to have many dependencies outside of Python, PIL, and LibXML for Python. This should also help ensure it still runs on Win32.

  • I need to create a solid standard for path naming. Either they need to end with an os.sep or they shouldn’t.

Anyway, I’m sure more will come as I get a chance to write more next week after Kristina goes back to Texas for a few days. In unrelated news, I gave Kristina a new website but she can’t use it until after we get married.