TL;DR

Where I rediscover an old piece of software

Some time ago I found iGal, a Perl program to produce galleries of photos.

Briefly after that, I decided to re-implement it. Mostly for fun and for exploring the challenges that this would pose. The result was pgal, which was available from my web site… at that time.

I guess these kind of softwares have been overseded by something different today. Or maybe not. Anyway, I found it useful again to build my previous post Some CC0 images, which gave me the prompt to…

• … renovate the code a bit (e.g. by using Path::Tiny instead of a lot of other modules), and…
• … package the software as a Docker image based on Alpine Linux.

So there you have it: pgal, the gallery generator!

To use the pre-packaged Docker image:

• ensure you can get images from GitHub’s registry (this, I guess, requires you to have an account)
• use the image!

PGAL='docker.pkg.github.com/polettix/pgal/pgal:latest'
ROOT='/path/to/album/root'
docker run --rm -itv "$ROOT:/mnt" "$PGAL" -c -r

UPDATE the driver script above has been updated to… work. See also A wrapper/driver shell program for pgal for a better alternative.

This will get you started. At this point:

• edit file/files .captions to provide a title to the album (or sub-albums too), as well as captions for each individual image (you can also reorder them and/or exclude some);
• edit .index_template (in the album or in a sub-album) to change the appearance of the page indexing all photos;
• edit .page_template (in the album or in a sub-album) to change the appearance of the page dedicated to a single photo;
• re-run the command above to update the generated pages.

I guess this is it!