Album is a program that creates an HTML photo album. All that is needed is an XML file that describes the layout of the album and provides captions etc, an XSL file describing the layout of the pages and the images themselves. The images must be in Jpeg format, which most photo CD’s seem to have. The program automatically scales them so that their long edges are the same length. It is assumed that they are already the right way up(some photo CD’s don’t do this). The program takes all these and spits out a directory full of HTML pages and image files. These can be uploaded straight onto a website.
Libraries
The program is supplied with Xerces, an XML parser and Xalan, an XSLT processor. The program accesses them through a standardised JAXP interface, so they can probably be replaced with other JAXP compliant libraries. Both of these programs were developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Another program from Apache, Ant is used to build the project.
Download
The program is available for download as a .zip file, or a .tar.gz file. My code is released under the terms of the GPL, Xalan and Xerces are covered by the Apache Licence. There is a sample Photo Album included. This is still very much a work in progress, there is no documentation, few error messages, and some fairly bizarre ‘features’. One such feature is that it pauses between compressing each image. This is because my PC has a propensity for overheating…
Improvements
I can only really see this program being useful for people who are already creating static pages using XSL. Most people seem to be moving toward dynamic pages that apply style sheets ‘on the fly’, so this program is probably already out of date. Each run of the program takes quite a long time. It only creates the image files once, and doesn’t overwrite them, however it creates all the HTML files every time. A better way might be to have a ‘build’ directory which stores all the image files, and a list of creation dates and names, and all the XML files prior to their conversion to XML. This would make it less painful to play with different styles and layouts.
I think overall the best solution would have been to make an interactive program with a GUI. However it would have a lot longer to write. There are commercial websites that allow people to upload their photos, however I’m not sure that they would give as much flexibility as this solution, especially in terms of the final layout. With so much ‘free’ web space available I think there may be a market for an interactive program.
Updated (April 2007)
I no longer use this program, instead I’ve gone for a database backed dynamic site, created using Ruby on Rails. It gives me more flexibility then the likes of Flickr, but at the cost of a lot more effort.