I hear you asking: "yet another web gallery?"

Well, this is the gallery that fit my needs. It's up to you to give it a chance. See About section for more info and philosophical thoughts about joys and sorrows of web galleries.

Yarpen-gallery can handle images, music files (mp3, ogg, wma...), videos, and all other binary files as I require to handle it -- with thickbox pop-ups for images; and with simple access via links in the case of binary files.

About

There are hundreds of web galleries available. Why I decide to write one more? The answer is simple:

• I am lazy.
• I want to have a reusable piece of software featuring backup facility of family photo collection.
• I (read: my pretty wife) need the simplest files upload as is possible - just upload via ftp, sftp, scp, webdav, or whatever your server supports.
• It should be fully localized with minimal amount of text to translate for our older parents.
• It should display pictures of doggies without any distortion.
• Images of food and beer should be displayed in shiny warm tones.
• and one more: I don't agree with license agreements of public image gallery services (yep, I read it).

All these points are fulfilled with this cool yarpen-gallery

Installation

1. Download and unpack the tarball into requested directory.
2. Edit config.php file to fit your needs.
3. create THUMB_DIR, DISPLAY_DIR (specified in config.php) and make it writable for web server
4. copy your media/directories/files into BASE_DIR (specified in config.php)
5. customize web page layout (index.php, inc/style.css)
6. visit galleries with web browser to create thumbnails and displays
7. enjoy it and buy me a beer

Use this gallery in existing web

• just take index.php as an example. It can be inserted wherever - in all PHP codes.

Screenshots

System Description

The gallery is based only on file system (no additional database is needed). Yarpen-gallery is inspired by Thickbox Gallery (TBG), the most usable gallery I've ever found, but YG comes with reduced functionality set (no additional files handling, commenting, etc.). Yarpen-gallery is much more faster than TBG (and Gallery2, Coppermine and whatever I tried) for large collections.

Background

It takes files from so-called archive directory and transforms it into display and thumbnails files. Files in the archive archive are left untouched (archive/backup feature).

Let's describe a small example.

This is the base structure of directories before first upload:

/albums/
/thumbnails/
/display/

Then you connect with your ftp client to upload some files:

/albums/
  - foo
    - photo.jpg
    - video.mpg
    - document.pdf
/thumbnails/
/display/

Now, when you visit the gallery with browser some important things happen:

/albums/
  - foo
    - photo.jpg
    - video.mpg
    - document.pdf
/thumbnails/
  - foo
    - photo.jpg.jpg
    - video.mpg.jpg
    - document.pdf.jpg
/display/
  - foo
    - photo.jpg.jpg
    - video.mpg.jpg
    - document.pdf.jpg

Files in thumbnails and display directories are created on the fly (of course you can use a shell/python/whatever scripts to create it yourself or from cron.

Technical Informations

Requirements:

• PHP 5.0 or later
• php-imagick module 2.0 or greater (prefered) or php-gd module
• two directories writable by web server

Miscellaneous notes for code crawlers:

• It should use exif, more ajax, whatever). No it doesn't. Or patch it yourself and send it to me.
• It's written with functions. I don't use classes as I don't need to.
• There is no additional template system used. You know, PHP is templating system itself.
• It mixes HTML and logic together. Who cares?
• And many more - just because I don't like web coding.