Rhotoalbum
A web photo album is already a common thing. The majority uses online web albums, where you can upload your photos, e.g. Flickr and Google’s Picasa. Also some social network portals are adding features to share photos between their users.
A much smaller group downloaded and installed a photo album application to their accounts on servers, e.g. Gallery and Coppermine. Usually they require to have a database and have a large possibilities to configure it, install plug-ins, manage photos, etc.
And then there is a special category — photo album generators. They are much simpler, usually do not use any database, but you have to regenerate your albums when you change your photos or you add a new photo.
Actually, I used Gallery for 4 years :) It worked fine, I liked some plug-ins, the provided themes were ok… But a few months ago, I updated to a newer version and… strange exceptions, I tried to use a backup, but it was the end :|
Then I found out that Gallery stored my photos in a nice directory structure — each album was a directory and its sub-albums were subdirectories; of course, photos were files stored in this directories. And I remembered my previous blogging system — PyBlosxom — a nice solution: simple but powerful. Categories are directories, files are blog entries. The last update time of a file is the time of a corresponding blog entry.
I said to my self — let’s create a simple photo album. Nothing complicated, no database, no configuration file. And directory-file based.
Firstly I planned to create a Ruby on Rails application, but unfortunately there is no RoR on the server where I have an account. Only Ruby.
Well, to make the story short: I created Rhotoalbum — a photo album generator in Ruby.
If you would like to see Rhotoalbum in action — check my photoalbum.
Enjoy :)