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img2html - Image to HTML generation tool

A shell script to generate web galleries for directories with images.


Description

img2html is a shell script to generate a HTML gallery for a directory with digital images.

The generated pages do not need any web server support (also they can of course be viewed via a web server) and are therefore suitable to be burned on a CD. Currently the script is optimized to be used with my CANON Powershot G1/G2. Anyway it should be easy (if necessary at all!) to adapt it to other models if this is needed. Usually only movies (other than *.avi) need adaption, most jpegs are handled correctly. There are two kinds of pages: the first kind is just plain HTML without any gimmicks, the second kind is the full featured version. Frames, javascript and cookies are extensively used to give the following features:

  • Selection of images
    • You can select your favourite images and then save or load this selection via cookies (this is the only cookie which is used!).
    • This selection can be used to skip unwanted images while browsing manually through the images or using the automatic SlideShow.
    • Also you can request the selected images (via mail-form of you provider, this feature needs adaption to your needs)
  • SlideShow with adjustable cycle time.
  • Adding image information and comments, these can be sent (via mail-form of your provider, this feature needs adaption to your needs) or added by hand to the "images.js" database.
  • Display of some EXIF information which is embedded in the images.

Details

Usage: img2html.sh [-full] DIRECTORY_WITH_IMAGES

You will be asked some questions and then all JPEGs are converted to

  • a quality reduced full image with copyright notice
  • a size and quality reduced preview version and
  • to a very small thumbnail version.
If the appropriate tool (jhead) is installed, the thumbnail is taken out of the EXIF header. If the converted images are already existing, they are of course reused. While converting the images two indexes are written. One is for the plain HTML version, the other one is for the full featured version. Also the plain HTML pages are generated on the fly.

If you use the command-line option "-full" the links to the fullsize images are added. Else only the preview images are used. You can specify a different URL for the fullsize images, too. Only when specifying this option movies are handled! If there are some movies (extension ".avi") and option "-full" is specified, currently an index of the thumbnails (taken from the corresponding ".thm" files) is written to a separate HTML page.

Tips and Tricks

You can use jpegtran from the JPEG group to rotate your images lossless. A somehow enhanced version (including bugfixes!) called jpegcrop is available from guido AT jpegclub.org.

Author

Thomas Hopfner

License

© 2001, 2002 Thomas Hopfner
This software is free of charge, but without any warranty! It might even destroy your whole system. Of course it is tested, used by me and I do think no harm will be done. Anyway it is recommend to make a backup copy of your data before running this script. As I am not sure at the moment which well known open-source license I will use in the future, I just demand that you keep my copyright notices and the link to the original version of img2html.sh when modifying the source. If you include my code in any commercial or shareware project, you have to send me a free copy of your program! Of course you have to make clearly visible that your version is modified by you, if you have modified it!

Requirements

This script is tested on a linux machine (RedHat), but should also run on any kind of Unix system. Windows is not supported, anyway you can use the free cygwin environment to get this script running (Warning: The ImageMagick tool convert has the same name as the Windows tool to convert FAT to NTFS. Carefully check your path!) At least you need the following tools:

  • bash Shell
  • Standard GNU utils like: cat, sed, awk, find, grep, ls, head
  • ImageMagick tools: convert and mogrify for image conversion
  • for EXIF extraction: jhead
    A IMHO very useful and good tool from Matthias Wandel.
  • A directory full of nice images. ;)
Except jhead all tools should be included in your standard linux distribution.

Download and ChangeLog

Click here to download img2html.sh. A history of changes can be found here.

Installation

Download the script and move it to a suitable location in your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin/). It might be necessary to change the first line in the file to match the location of your bash executable. Edit the line with AUTHOR= to match your name if you want this as default, also you can edit the parameters for convert in the source code.
If you do not want to allow users of your gallery to send comments, you need to set the variable allowcomments in images.js database to 0.


Changes:
Thomas Hopfner, 08/2001: Started page
Thomas Hopfner, 01/2003: Updated page