IGAL Image generator - enhanced version

igal is a quick and easy program for placing your images online with just one command-line. It generates a pretty good-looking set of W3-compliant static HTML slides even with its default settings. To try it out just run igal in a directory with jpg, gif or png files and check the output in a web browser. You can adjust the appearance of the image gallery with the many options listed below or (if you know a bit of HTML) by modifying the .indextemplate.html, .slidetemplate.html and igal.css files that appeared in your image directory. igal also checks for the existence of a $HOME/.igal directory where users can store their own templates, overriding the site-wide /usr/local/lib/igal.

igal needs Perl to run and it also relies on a few other programs that come standard with most Linux distributions. It relies on the ImageMagick package first if available, otherwise it falls back onto cjpeg/djpeg/pnmscale for processing jpg files. The command convert of the ImageMagick package is required to process gif and png files and the identify command enables igal to include IMG HEIGHT and WIDTH tags in the HTML it generates.

Update Nov. 2008

Development is going on in igal2. The main reason for the new name is that igal seems to be orphaned as Eric Pop seems not to do any new development. New features and changes in the Image Gallery Generator will be done in igal2.

Update Feb. 2008

  • New version 1.4.7-wt
    Riku Kalinen fixed the option "--xy" which, for the first time, seems now to do what it was meant to do! See Change Log. Thanks...
  • I'm in contact with the debian maintainer of igal, who also has a bunch of changes and bugfixes in queue since the original author is not doing any changes any more. We're planning to make igal-wt the new debian upstream (but this will take some time).

Update Nov. 2007

  • New version 1.4.6-wt
    Stewart Addison (contactsxa@gmail.com) did some bug fixing and enhancements (Watermarking, alternate location of full size pictures) to version 1.4.5-wt. Please see the new options -o and -m below. I haven't tested the new features, but they seem to work well for Stewart.
  • It seems the igal web site was removed (404 error) and Eric Pop is not maintaining it any more! I found some hints that the igal page moved to http://nanoheat.stanford.edu/epop/igal/ but this one is not reachable (at least now).

History of igal-wt

I made some changes and enhancements to the last official igal version 1.4 and asked the author & maintainer (Eric Pop) if he's willing to accept them for the next igal version.

As I got no answer I decided to put my version on the web, eventually my changes are useful for others too. For details about igal itself please see the fine documentation Eric puted on the web (page removed?).

New functions and cleanups

These are the new functions (compared to igal 1.4) and cleanups in version 1.4.7-wt (that's what I call it):
  • --dest dir
    Destination directory for the helper files (thumbnails, slides, etc.) igal generates. This is relative to the operative directory -d and has to be one level below (.)
  • --AddSubdir
    If igal finds further directories beneath your image directory -d, it will generate HTML Links in the index file (index.html) to this directories. Default is (off). Directories given with --dest or starting with a "." will be ignored. Note: igal will not work recursively, it just adds HTML links to the directories below.
  • Support for international characters
    Igal no longer has to ask the user what to do with "invalid" filenames, as they will be handled properly. It is not necessary to change filenames anymore (i.e. if there are white spaces in it), as all filenames will be URL encoded when they are used within HTML code. That means igal now supports international 8 bit characters as used in german umlauts or other languages as well as blanks or other special characters in file names.
  • -m <file>
    Automatically add watermark to each image - this works well with a transparent .gif, but anything can be used - edit the "composite" line later on to adjust visibility/position of mark if required Originals will be left with a .unmarked extension
  • -o <dir>
    Root URL of alternate location for the links to full size images. Use this if your indexes will be in a different location/server from the back end images
  • Beside that I altered the way files are read an parsed, in an as I think more convinient way. I also deleted the redundant special handling for the (incomplete) last row of pictures, this is now handled within the same loop as the other rows.
I've changed the manpage to explain this a bit more in detail. Please note that I changed the indextemplate.html file, as well as others. That means that when running the new version of igal in a directory with an existing igal index-template of an previous version, the results will be insufficient. Therefore these files should be removed before.

Download

Old versions:


Wolfgang Trexler, 2003-2008
If you wan't to contact me please use the mail address first-name@last-name.at (where first-name is wolfgang, and... I think you got the concept).