lately i’ve been thinking about adding a photo gallery page to my website with sub-galleries for different categories of photos. i have a large number of photos that i’d want to add, however, so the amount of work necessary to do this manually seems a bit daunting (writing HTML for each photo individually, creating separate low-res thumbnails, stuff like that), and i could totally see myself giving up on keeping it updated over time due to that.
for anyone who has a big photo or art gallery on their website, how do you manage it and keep it updated? do you just do it manually, or is there some tool or piece of software that you use to help with the workload?
i made a gallery site for a friend once using melon’s gallery maker, which i find easy and enjoyable to use. my friend’s case was more of a “make it once and be done with it” scenario, but i think the software is able to detect which images are new so you don’t have to re-proccess all your existing gallery photos when you want to add to it.
for my own site, i do everything manually because the only gallery i have is tiny
I usually code the HTML myself because I like having more control over it, even when it’s more daunting that way. I keep them in unordered list format, so that they’re easily styled or added to gallery scripts afterwards. But for thumbnails I’d suggest looking into using ImageMagick, which can do it automatically from the command line:
HAHA god this is what my entire website was built on! My main goal of my website was to have a gallery of all my Pokemon stuff! Trans Rats!
I keep it updated manually, I really can’t fathom another way to do it. I have thumbnails of all images that, when clicked on, take you to a separate page with the full-size image and details about the thing I’m talking about (usually a plushie).
It took a hell of a lot of time but it’s very satisfying, imo. Once you get a template down it’s a lot of copy+pasting which is fun to me. Though I do tend to procrastinate keeping it up-to-date; but the hardest part for me is getting the pictures taken, so if you’re planning on just displaying pictures you already have then I think it would be easier. I’m just slow to get things staged and photographed
I haven’t done this yet, but I’m thinking about dividing my art gallery into different “rooms”. Sort of like a real gallery. That way all the images won’t be on the same page.
I am in the process of switching to Coppermine just because it’s easier to maintain than manually adding stuff, and since I can have multiple galleries I can put character commissions, my own art, and my photography all up.
The way that I have my animation gallery set up is that each animation has its own folder, with contains:
an index.md for the title, date, metadata and process details
the preferred VP9 version index.webm at its original resolution, and a fallback H.264 version index.mp4 at a smaller resolution to please older devices such as my older iPhone
a cropped 2:1 aspect ratio thumbnail for the gallery called thumbnail.webp
any process footage or images I make will be put in there too, and all have VP9 and H.264 versions
For each video I encode a WebP thumbnail, to discourage preloading the videos, as well as using some HTML trickery to maintain the size of the video element after the video play button is clicked but before the video has actually loaded (otherwise it shrinks for a fraction of a second, which is not pleasant).
Lastly, for the index page, I just use a templated Markdown file (processed by Jekyll) that duplicates a grid cell for each folder name. All the index and thumbnail files adhere to the convention set above, so {animation}/thumbnail.webp always grabs the thumbnail and {animation}/ is the link to itself. So generating the right links is not a hard task at all.
Admittedly it’s a pretty manual process and in an ideal world I would write my own static site generator to ease this work. But for now, this works.
i was originally gonna use coppermine on my site because i am tooooo lazy to manually assemble a gallery, but i didn’t like that i couldn’t find any responsive themes for it. so i went with zenphoto as an alternative and i actually like it more, there’s a few responsive themes to choose from and i like the admin interface :^D
I was thinking about this the other day since I’m not used to building static sites. I came up with something similar to Melvian where I’d have:
A gallery.csv file with each row being: (image_url, thumbnail_url, image_title, image_description, category, etc, etc)
A bit of JS which reads it and spits out a html template for each image. Can filter on any of the columns, or load only the images for the current category, etc.
A simple build script which looks at all images in the image folder and generates thumbnails, adds missing rows to the CSV.
It’d be a bit of work to setup, but it’d essentially be kind of like having a database to pull data from, then, and I could just dump a picture into the pictures folder, run the script, deploy to neocities and have it show up in the main gallery. And because it’s homebrew I’d still get total freedom over how it’s rendered.
I’m thinking of doing a similar thing for articles, too and just managing my site content via csv tables.
All that being said though I think there must be some static site management tools that do all this, already.
I always struggle with this! I’m currently using Chevereto, but their support is meh and it’s still not exactly what I want. Not bad though. And thank you for sharing the Gallery Maker, I had no idea about it!
