Automat is an extremely lightweight photo album generator that I wrote after an evening of trying to build a photo album for about 1400 baby pictures and not having any luck with any of the free software I could find. I eventually lost patience and wrote my own program instead.
Automat consists of two programs;
mkindex, which is used to generate the initial photo album,
and updindex, which is used to merge new folders into the
existing album. Both programs require awk and sed,
which can be found on just about every UNIX® box out there,
plus the netpbm tools,
libjpeg and
libpng.
To install it, get a current tarball and
unpack it somewhere on your system. Run
configure.sh to
configure it, then do a make install.
To use automat, cd to the root of your photo album and type
mkindex /list of files or folders/
Mkindex will go off and build thumbnails and index pages for every
folder containing jpeg or png images that it can find
in your photo album. This may take a long time – I have approximately
a gigabyte of baby pictures and it takes approximately 45 minutes to
index everything. Later, as you add new folders containing images, you
can get them into the album by cd'ing to the directory containing the
new folder and doing
updindex
there.
Automat allows some small degree of customization to photo
albums. It uses the file .title in each folder to set the
title of the index page for that folder, and it copies the contents
of the file .header into the index page before the thumbnail
list and the contents of the file .footer into the index page
after the thumbnail list. When it runs, it generates thumbnail files
named .number.jpg, and reduced size images (if the
original photo is larger than 640x480) named .number-size.jpg.
(You may customise the size of the reduced size image, as well as a few
other things, when you run*configure.sh.)
If you have php in your web server,
you can configure automat to (pretend to) take advantage of it; the
--with-php option tells automat to generate a view.php
file in each album – this viewer allows you to go between pictures in
an album without having to back up to the album and select new pictures.
Currently (Oct 21, 2002) the viewer has all the names of the pictures
hardcoded into it, but that particular whopping kludge is going to be
replaced with a dbm (or the like) database which mkindex, updindex,
view.php, and any other support routines I might wish to write can
manipulate in a slightly less painful manner.
/bin/sh code.