A program for generating image gallery web pages.
By Mark Ashdown,
www.ashdown.me
Thumbelina is a program for generating web pages containing thumbnails (small copies of images) from collections of images such as photographs. You start with a directory containing various photographs, then generate the web page and all associated images in a separate output directory. You then copy that output directory to your web site for people to browse the images.
The program has been developed on Windows, but it should also work on any Unix, Linux, or Mac system. No installation is necessary, just unzip the files and put them in a suitable place on your hard drive.
When you unzip the zip file you downloaded you should get a directory
called Thumbelina which contains these files and directories:
bin - binary files. You shouldn't need to look in here.config - directory containing the configuration files which you may edit (see below for details).example - example set of images for you to test that the program is working.output - empty directory that can be used to store the output of the program.readme.html - this help file.run.jar - runs the program.The program is written in Java so you must have the Java Runtime Environment installed before you use it. If you haven't already got it, go to java.com and click the link entitled "Java software for the desktop" that will allow you to download and install the Java 2 Runtime Environment (J2RE) Standard Edition.
To run the program just double-click on run.jar.
The program comes with a directory called example that contains
some example images and data for you to test that the program is working.
When you first start the program the input and output directories should
automatically set themselves to something like
C:\Thumbelina\example and
C:\Thumbelina\output. To process the example images just click
the Start button. Some messages will appear in the text area.
When the processing has finished click the Launch Browser
button to view result. Alternatively you can
go to the output directory and double-click
on the file index.html to see the finished gallery web page.
To put a page like this on your web site you should copy the entire contents
of the output directory to a new directory on your web server.
To make your own simple thumbnail page, create a new directory, for example
C:\images and put all of the images in it, then make another
directory, for example C:\output, that will hold the finished web
page. Start Thumbelina, set Input Directory to
C:\images and Output Directory to
C:\output, then click Start. When processing has
finished click Launch Browser
Note, the program will not create the output directory
so it must exist in advance.
The Stop button will terminate processing prematurely.
The Launch Browser button will start a web browser to view the
thumbnail page you have created. The Clear Output button will
delete all files in the output directory. It is a good idea to do this before
creating the final version of your thumbnail page just to make sure that there
are no old files hanging around.
Rather than just putting a set of images in your input directory you can put in a set of folders each containing images. Thumbelina will automatically generate a web page that lists the folders, and links from that to a page that list the images in each folder.
You can add captions to the thumbnails by adding text to the image file names. For instance, you could rename an image from 001.jpg to 001-My house.jpg. Then the caption "My house" will be added to the thumbnail.
You can add titles and messages to the galleries you create by putting a file called gallery.xml in the directory containing the images.
This file is written in XML.
A simple gallery.xml file might look like this:
<thumbelina>
<gallery>
<heading>Holiday</heading>
<message>Here are the photos from my holiday</message>
</gallery>
</thumbelina>
The <thumbelina> tag is always required.
The <gallery> tag tells the program to make an image gallery.
The <heading> and <message> tags
specify text that will be included in the final web page.
You can also include images explicitly in a gallery using the
<image> tag. Look in the examples directory
to see how to do it.
In your gallery.xml file you can also use a
<settings> tag which contains <item> tags.
For a list of the settings you can use look in Thumbelina's config
directory. In there you will also find .html
files that are used to form the HTML of the final web pages.
The HTML contains tags of the form $$$TAGNAME$$$ which are replaced
by automatically generated HTML.
To make a new theme for your web pages you can copy one of the directories in the config directory then alter the XML and HTML files inside that.
Alternatively you can put the HTML files in the same directories as your source images. They will be automatically detected and used by the program.
See the customized directory in the examples for an example of
this.
If you are putting high resolution images (greater than 800x600) on the web
you may want to reduce the images to save bandwidth and/or space on your
server. You can do this with the resize-xxx settings. For example:
<settings>
<item name="resize-originals" value="reduce"/>
<item name="resize-width" value="800"/>
<item name="resize-height" value="800"/>
</settings>
If you want to have non-Latin characters in your web page then you should
save your gallery.xml file in unicode.
The program has been tested with Japanese.
If you discover a bug with the latest version of this program please email mail@mark.ashdown.name.
This software is provided "as is", without any guarantee made as to its suitability or fitness for any particular use. Use it at your own risk.
You are free to copy and distribute this program but it must be distributed in its entirety, including this readme file.