[[!template id=plugin name=album author="[[Simon_McVittie|smcv]]"]] [[!template id=gitbranch branch=smcv/album author="[[Simon_McVittie|smcv]]"]] [[!tag type/chrome]] Available from [[smcv]]'s git repository, in the `album` branch ([[users/smcv/gallery|users/smcv/gallery]] contains some older thoughts about this plugin). This plugin formats a collection of images into a photo album, in the same way as many websites: good examples include the PHP application [Gallery](http://gallery.menalto.com/), Flickr, and Facebook's Photos "application". I've called it `album` to distinguish it from [[contrib/gallery|plugins/contrib/gallery]], although `gallery` might well be a better name for this functionality. The web UI I'm trying to achieve consists of one [HTML page of thumbnails](http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/2008/2008-03-08-panic-cell-gig/) as an entry point to the album, where each thumbnail links to [a "viewer" HTML page](http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/2008/2008-03-08-panic-cell-gig/img_0068/) with a full size image, next/previous thumbnail links, and [[plugins/comments]]. (The Summer of Code [[plugins/contrib/gallery]] plugin does the next/previous UI in Javascript using Lightbox, which means that individual photos can't be bookmarked in a meaningful way, and the best it can do as a fallback for non-Javascript browsers is to provide a direct link to the image.) <h2 id="album"><code>album</code> directive</h2> Each page containing an `album` directive is treated as a photo album. Every image attached to an album or its subpages is considered to be part of the album. A "viewer" page, with the wiki's default page extension, will be generated to display the image, if there isn't already a page of the same name as the image: for instance, if `debconf` is an album and `debconf/tuesday/p100.jpg` exists, then `debconf/tuesday/p100.mdwn` might be created. There's currently a hard-coded list of extensions that are treated as images: `png`, `gif`, `jpg`, `jpeg` or `mov` files. More image and video types could be added in future. Videos aren't currently handled very well; ideally, something like totem-video-thumbnailer would be used. The `album` directive also produces an [[ikiwiki/directive/inline]] which automatically includes all the viewers for this album, except those that will appear in an <a href="#albumsection">albumsection</a> (if every image is in a section, then the `album` directive won't have any visible effect). The `inline` is in `archive` and `quick` mode, but can include some extra information about the images, including file size and a thumbnail made using [[ikiwiki/directive/img]]). The default template is `albumitem.tmpl`, which takes advantage of these things. <h2 id="albumsection"><code>albumsection</code> directive</h2> The `albumsection` directive is used to split an album into sections. It can only appear on a page that also has the <a href="#album">album</a> directive. The `filter` parameter is a [[ikiwiki/PageSpec]] against which viewer pages are matched. The `albumsection` directive displays all the images that match the filter, and the `album` directive displays any leftover images, like this: # Holiday photos \[[!album]] <!-- replaced with a list of any uncategorized photos, which might be empty --> ## People \[[!albumsection filter="tagged(people)"]] <!-- replaced with a list of photos tagged 'people', including any that are also tagged 'landscapes' --> ## Landscapes \[[!albumsection filter="tagged(landscapes)"]] <!-- replaced with a list of photos tagged 'landscapes', including any that are also tagged 'people' --> <h2 id="albumimage"><code>albumimage</code> directive</h2> Each viewer page produced by the <a href="#album">album</a> directive contains an `albumimage` directive, which is replaced by an [[ikiwiki/directive/img]], wrapped in some formatting using a template (by default it's `albumviewer.tmpl`). That template can also include links to the next photo, the previous photo and the album it's in; the default template has all of these. The next/previous links are themselves implemented by evaluating a template, either `albumnext.tmpl` or `albumprev.tmpl` by default. The directive can also have parameters: * `title`, `copyright` and `date` are short-cuts for the corresponding [[ikiwiki/directive/meta]] directives * `caption` sets a caption which is displayed in the album and viewer pages The viewer page can also have other contents before or after the actual image viewer. ## Bugs * The plugin doesn't do anything special to handle albums that are subpages of each other. If, say, `debconf` and `debconf/monday` are both albums, then `debconf/monday/p100.jpg` will currently be assigned to one or the other, arbitrarily. * The plugin doesn't do anything special to handle photos with similar names. If you have `p100.jpg` and `p100.png`, one will get a viewer page called `p100` and the other will be ignored. * If there's no `albumimage` in a viewer page, one should probably be appended automatically. ## TODO * The documentation should mention how to replicate the appearance of `album` and `albumsection` using an `inline` of viewer pages. * The documentation should mention all the template variables and all the parameters. * The generated viewer page should include most or all of the possible parameters to the `albumimage` directive, with empty values, as a template for editing. * The generated viewer page should extract as much metadata as possible from the photo's EXIF tags (creation/modification dates, author, title, caption, copyright). [[smcv]] has a half-written implementation which runs `scanimage` hooks, and has an `exiftool` plugin using [[!cpan Image::ExifTool]] as a reference implementation of that hook. * There should be an option to reduce the size of photos and write them into an underlay, for this workflow: * your laptop's local ikiwiki has two underlays, `photos` and `webphotos` * `photos` contains full resolution photos with EXIF tags * for each photo that exists in `photos` but not in `webphotos`, the album plugin automatically resamples it down to a web-compatible resolution ([[smcv]] uses up to 640x640), optimizes it with `jpegoptim`, strips out all EXIF tags, and and writes it into the corresponding location in `webphotos` * `webphotos` is what you rsync to the web server * the web server's ikiwiki only has `webphotos` as an underlay * Eventually, there could be a specialized CGI user interface to batch-edit all the photos of an album (so for each photo, you get an edit box each for title, author, copyright etc.) - this would work by making programmatic edits to all the `albumimage` directives.