Offline Gallery Generator

The goal of this project is to create an off-line photo gallery suitable for file archiving to encourage the disuse of centralized cloud services like Google or Apple Photos. It will scan provided directories for photos matching your criteria and generate an organized file structure with index.html files which can be stored on a NAS or stored on archival storage medium like M-Disc.

Apps like PhotoSync can be used to copy photos from your mobile device to bypass centralized servers.

Project status: Active development

Planned Features

Example Usage:

./generate-gallery
--copy --move --link # what to do with source photos

--clean # remove any existing gallery artifacts
--scrub-exif  # remove any unessisary exif data from originals. Does nothing when --link

--only=*.jpg
--exif-filter=SUB-STRING # only includes files where exif contains SUB-STRING.
--exclude=PATTERN       # exclude files matching PATTERN, ex *.png
--include=PATTERN       # don't exclude files matching PATTERN

--thumb=600 # create multiple resized photos 
--thumb=1024
--max-px=3000 # resize any photos over this size. Does nothing when --link

--split=4.7GB # split gallery into chunks for DVD burn

~/Pictures  # list any number of directories to scan
/mnt/old-backup-drive
./my-gallery #output directory is last

Use tools.cli for command line parsing.

File Scanning

With the specified directories, the project needs to collect the files to add to the gallery.

Potential Clojure libraries to use:

• File name scanning, ex (glob "*.{jpg,gif}") https://github.com/jkk/clj-glob
• Nice to have, low priority - De-duplication, can use SHA hash or photo finger printing library
• JPEG meta data reading (date, location, exposure, etc) Clojure EXIF library

Photo Processing

After finding the photos to add, thumbnails need to be generated.

• Clojure photo resize library

Gallery Generation

Files will be grouped together by the date the photo was taken and stored in a logical directory structure. Files may be renamed based on configuration.

Example structure:

/my-gallery
  index.html
  /2020/
        index.html
        /01/index.html
        /01/originals/
                   2020-01-10-1345.orig.jpg
                    2020-01-11-1201.orig.jpg
        /01/thumbs/
                  2020-01-10-1345.sm.jpg
                  2020-01-11-1201.sm.jpg

Ideally, there should be a minimum number of files added to an index.html gallery because not every day/month will have a significant number.

After all the daily/weekly/month gallery files are generated, a parent index.html file will be generated which will pick sample photos from each set to preview for a link to the sub-pages.

This will allow easy navigation to find specific photos with an estimate on when the photos might have been taken.

Further, the pre-generated thumbnails will allow easy sharing small size files via email. The gallery will have links to the originals as well.