[[!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, 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
as an entry point to the album, where each thumbnail links to
a "viewer" HTML page
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.)
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 albumsection (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.
The albumsection directive is used to split an album into sections. It can
only appear on a page that also has the album 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' -->
Each viewer page produced by the album 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.
