Randall's Webalbum Software

The photo album website was created with software I put together for the purpose. After checking out several different webalbum programs I realized there was not one available that does what I want, so I was forced to do it myself. I have placed this software into the public domain and you are free to use or alter it for your own purposes.

You will probably need to have some programming skills in order to do this. I AM NOT PROVIDING ANY FREE SUPPORT! Consulting services are available, for a fee. However if something described on this page is not clear, I will fix or improve it. Please send comments or questions to randallg@telemark.net.

Features:

• Multiple albums - one per subdirectory
• Displays two frames - a thumbnail index down the left side and a main window for displaying the Main page or large photos
• The Main page contains your introductory text, plus all photo descriptions and narratives ordered consecutively
• When you click a thumbnail to display a large photo in the main window, it is automatically resized to fit
• Each photo page has a link to the "full size" photo, which opens another window with the image in its original size with no scaling

Prerequisites:

• You must have a Perl interpreter. You can get it free at: http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/.
• In addition to Perl you need ImageMagick, which is an image library that the Perl script uses to process the images. You can get it free at www.imagemagick.org. Download and install the appropriate version for your system.
• Your web server must be Microsoft's IIS running on Windows NT Server or later. It is probably possible to alter my server script for other platforms without too much trouble, as long as you have support for XML/XSL stylesheet processing.

Components:

• There are a couple of Perl scripts which you run on your workstation to create the images and content files.
• On the web server there is one .ASP script file, and one XSL stylesheet file.

The process of creating a webalbum follows these steps:

• Collect your pictures into a directory. These can be loaded from a digital camera or scanned from prints or slides. They must be in JPG format.
• The picture files must be consecutively named in the format NNN.jpg, where NNN is a three digit number. I have provided a perl script rename.pl which can help you do this quickly.
• Do any picture preprocessing, such as cropping or adjusting contrast, colour etc. Do not change your image sizes after this.
• Run the Perl script mkweb.pl in your directory. This will automatically do the following:
  • Create a subdirectory wwwroot which will contain all the web files
  • Create a full size and a small thumbnail of each image
  • Create an empty XML content file called content.xml
• Edit content.xml to add your comments and narrative
• Transfer the directory wwwroot, plus the files pix.asp and pix.xsl to the appropriate location on your web server

Album Content:

The file content.xml contains all your comments and narrative for the album. It is in XML format. mkweb.pl generates an empty one for you when you first run it. Then you can edit it to add your specific content. When you look at the file it should be pretty self explanatory. There are some overall tags such as "title" and "intro", and there is a "photo" tag for each image. Each "photo" tag has these fields:

• num - don't change this
• caption - a short name that appears with each thumbnail and expanded image - defaults to num
• keywords - this goes into the meta keyword tag for the page which contains the expanded image - search engines are supposed to pay attention to this
• description - all descriptions are displayed consecutively on the main page, preceded by the image number
• narrative - narrative fields are interspersed with the descriptions on the main page, but without the image number. You can use this to add paragraphs of prose between the numbered descriptions

Be careful editing content.xml - if you screw up the tagging the web server will display nothing but an error message. For simplicity, by default the description and narrative fields are stored as attributes of the photo tag. However if you want to enter anything other than plain text, such as links or HTML formatting, you must change them to subtags rather than attributes. For instance this will not work:

<photo num="001" description="I want to include a link <a href="http://www.someplace.com">here</a>"/>

You will have to do it this way:

<photo num="001"><description>I want to include a link <a href="http://www.someplace.com">here</a></description></photo>

Web Server Files:

• Place pix.asp and pix.xsl in a virtual directory on your web server. This is the root of your photo albums.
• Each album goes in a subdirectory from pix.asp. The name of the directory is the name of the album. Copy the contents of wwwroot from your workstation to this directory, including subdirectories.
• Access your albums with this URL:
  http://www.yourserver.com/yourphotodirectory/pix.asp?album=albumname

Download the Files

Pix.zip contains the files rename.pl, mkweb.pl, pix.asp and pix.xsl.
Click here to download pix.zip