Freeware Exif Capable .Net Web Gallery

[DrebelHobbyist]

UPDATE: Release Canidate 2 (RC2) is available for download. Read posts below for a download link and setup instructions.

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I've been working on my Web Gallery written exclusively in .Net for photographers/hobbyists. I'm likely going to release as a commercial product soon, but I was curious if anyone else would be interested in running it for free in the meantime. It has been working flawlessly for me hosting my family's pictures.

Anyway, features include:

Automatic (on-the-fly) thumbnail generation and save-to-disk caching for later use

The entire web interface is build on a single documented style sheet, so you can make it look like anything you want.

The program is configurable to specify the maximum number of columns, rows, and the thumbnail size to customize the gallery.

This is currently disabled on the gallery you'll see below, but the software supports full EXIF tags when you click to see the full version of the pic.

The entire site is run exclusively by 3 web pages to simplify everything.

You won't find a 'post a picture' button anywhere because all of the pictures actually just mirror the file structure they're stored in. So if you want to 'post' more pictures, you just create a folder on the web server and move all of your pictures to that folder. A new gallery is automatically created instantly and the thumbnails will be generated on the fly the first time someone visits the page.

When you visit, ignore the 'Galleria Demo' stamp on the thumbnails... I was experimenting with creating a free demo version for some clients. It will be removed for anyone that wants to run this...

Currently Running Gallery: http://beeph.no-ip.com/thumbnail/gallery.aspx (Yes, I know the pictures are lame)

Interested in trying for free? Drop me an email or reply to this post... cscheets@remooovethis.kc.rr.com

[DrebelHobbyist]

Well, that really figures... my cable connection seems to have died right after I posted this. (Happens at least once a week) So, you can't get to my gallery until I get home to reset my cable modem.

Sorry, I'll post a reply when I get home and get it back up.

[SWPhotoImaging]

DrebelH,

This looks like a cool viewer/web generation program. I have a question. Do the dates and titles for the "albums" come from the folder creation date and name, since it is using the act of creating a folder to generate a new album?

anyway, I'd be very interested in beta-testing this for a while and providing feedback.

Thanks,

Steve W.

sdwike@hotmail.com

[TonyKInTexas]

What graphic library are you using?

A suggestion would be to add links for moving back in the navigation chain.

Otherwise it looks pretty good.

[DrebelHobbyist]

TonyKInTexas -
I forgot to mention, I am implementing navigation so that you can go back to any 'album' directly without using the back button on the browser. Very good catch.

As far as the graphic library, all code is either native to the .net framework or developed by myself. I'm not using any third party software/libraries at all. I wanted to make sure I could distribute the app any way I wanted (including free) without running into licensing issues with anyone.

sdwike -
You are exactly correct. The album date/time comes from the date/time stamp of the folder's creation. This basically means that creating a folder and creating an 'album' is synonymous for all practical purposes.

All -
I'll go ahead and polish up a few odds and ends in the code and zip it up for you guys to demo if you'd like. The installation will be very straight-forward for anyone that's ever deployed a web app... you'll just need an IIS web server with the .net framework loaded and about 2 minutes of your time to unzip and edit the .config file to setup the paths to your images and desired thumbnail cache location.

Thanks for the kind words... more to come very soon...

[TonyKInTexas]

Yes, I would like. I sent an e-mail just in case. :)

Take care,

[DrebelHobbyist]

Alright, Release Canidate 1 is available for download. I will be documenting intended changes or feature requests on a web page that I'll post here when I get it developed. For now, if you have any questions either email me directly or respond to this post.

The only licensing agreement you're bound to is this: The software is as-is is being offered as a test application for personal use and not commercial. It is being released as a 'test' and I'm not responsible for anything you try to do with it. Although I feel confident that it works very well, I don't want anybody think they're getting some enterprise-ready $10,000 commercial product for free.

I do intend to sell a professional version of this application in the future as the features increase. For those who help me with feature requests, bug reports, etc. I will be more than happy to grant free lifetime licenses for their personal use of the final product.

Anyway - for the impatient, here's the link:
http://beeph.no-ip.com/thumbnail/galleryrc1.zip

For those of you still with me, here are the basic setup instructions.

1. Make sure you have IIS loaded on Win2k, XP Pro, or 2003 and .net framework loaded. (1.0 or 1.1 will work fine)

2. Create a new web site or virtual folder in IIS. Make sure and configure it as an application and point it to the folder where you unzipped the contents of the zip file above. The default in the config file is a virtual folder called '/gallery'

3. The sub-folder of '/gallery/thumbs' should have write permissions enabled in IIS (this is where thumbnails are cached so they do not have to be generated every time)

4. Wherever your images are on your computer, share them as a virtual folder on your web server. The default virtual folder in the config file is '/gallery/images'.

5. If you used the defaults as I specified in steps 2 and 3, the page should be ready to go out of the box. If not, or if you wish to edit the more advanced features, edit the web.config file with a text editor (i.e. notepad) to make the configuration changes required.

6. Browse to gallery.aspx and if configure properly, you should be looking at all of the images/folders in your images directory!

Since any further instruction is outside the scope of this forum, I'll be creating a page to log feature requests, assistance, etc. There are only two items that I am currently aware of the desperately need attention:

1. Tree Navigation. currently there is no navigation on the page to move to the parent folder other than the back button on the browser. I'm working on this now.

2. EXIF data. Currently, exif data for an image may be accessed by clicking on its thumbnail in the gallery view. The exif data is displayed on a very boring and ugly page, that will be fixed VERY soon (I see it as top priority)

Have fun!

[DrebelHobbyist]

I forgot to mention, I packaged some test images in a subfolder called /images/ that contain some exif-loaded test jpegs from exif.org.

You can leave this folder there for testing first if you want but if you go to create a virtual folder /images/ then you'll need to rename/delete this folder first.

[TonyKInTexas]

I have it and it appears to be working.

A couple of observations.

1) Folders are not counted in the file lists. So someone might not think there is something in a folder because it shows '0'. In my case I have nested folders and those folders will have things in them.

2) When changing the web.config the application balks at the © symbol calling it an invalid symbol. The only way I am able to get it to work again is to remove the © symbol.

That's it for now.

[TonyKInTexas]

Another issue (at least for me) is the sorting. It appears to sort by the number of files first. I would prefer to see sorting in web.config *OR* by the folder name.

Thanks,

[DrebelHobbyist]

Glad to hear you got it working...

I forgot to mention the recursive folder size count. I did have code enabled to do this, but have disabled it because if there were very many nested folders it hurt the performance flipping through each of those folders on the drive.

So, I'm working on a solution - possibly a configurable option as well as an additional column to show how many sub-folders are in that folder. That coupled with a configurable caching length of time should resolve the issue. Right now the pages are cached for 120 seconds, but that could be increased significantly if someone were to use it in a larger enterprise environment to keep from hitting the drive so hard...

GREAT catch... I'll keep you updated on this one.

As for the sorting, it *should* be alphabetical order right now and is not currently configurable. Is this what you're seeing? What additional sorting options would you like to see?

[TonyKInTexas]

It does not need to get all folder counts. Just for the next level down so it will keep down the recursive calls.

In other words just look at the next level and see how many folders there are. Maybe have a separate column for folders and files but I'm not sure that would work well.

Take care,


DrebelHobbyist wrote:
Glad to hear you got it working...

I forgot to mention the recursive folder size count. I did have code enabled to do this, but have disabled it because if there were very many nested folders it hurt the performance flipping through each of those folders on the drive.

So, I'm working on a solution - possibly a configurable option as well as an additional column to show how many sub-folders are in that folder. That coupled with a configurable caching length of time should resolve the issue. Right now the pages are cached for 120 seconds, but that could be increased significantly if someone were to use it in a larger enterprise environment to keep from hitting the drive so hard...

GREAT catch... I'll keep you updated on this one.

As for the sorting, it *should* be alphabetical order right now and is not currently configurable. Is this what you're seeing? What additional sorting options would you like to see?

[TonyKInTexas]

Here's another suggestion / comment.

Do not show Next / Previous and page numbers when only one page is needed.

I've written a system that manages my website and it controls the Next, Previous, etc on the fly. As we know the max number of images per page and we know how many images are in a folder, we can control the placement and operation based on this information.

Am I making sense on this subject?

Take care,

[TonyKInTexas]

Another comment on sorting.

I see where the images are not sorted by image name. In fact I cannot determine how sorting is done, if at all.

Maybe it would be good to have a attribute in the web.config for sorting, such as by filename and if it is ascending or decending order.

Take care,

[TonyKInTexas]

Another suggestion.

If the copyright notice is too long to fit along the bottom, how about rotating it up the side. It makes sense to see if the length in pixels is greater than the image's width then rotate it for the height.

If the copyright notice is too big for both directions then reduce the size for this image so it will fit.

I have no idea if this is possible but it might be worth looking in to.

Take care,

[DrebelHobbyist]

_Awesome_ feedback Tony... I'm implementing the sorting as we speak, and I completely agree with all of the rest of your feedback and will implement asap... maybe today.... those are all very easy and logical changes - but much easier to see from a users' perspective.

I forgot to mention, check out 'signatureColor.txt' file to see all of the options for the signature color. This is all stuff that will need to make it into documentation somewhere - but that's a second priority right now :)

[TonyKInTexas]

I glanced at the TXT file but did not fully read it.

All in all it is a nice system.

Some more comments. I noticed in the ASPX files the layout is hard coded in. There might be another way to do this (I'm a programmer by job myself).

Instead of hard coding the layout in ASPX, why not create templates using XSLT. The documentation would list the field names that are required for this to work and the users could create their own layout.

The application would provide 2 or 3 templates to work with and the web.config would have an attribute for the current template to be used.

I know this would be a radical change from what you have. It might be worth considering at some future point.

Take care,

[DrebelHobbyist]

Check out my gallery again (link in signature) for updates. They include:

1. Full Navigation now in the header bar of the gallery list. You can now navigate directly to anywhere in the gallery tree without having to use the browser back button.

2. More dynamic signatures. As suggested, the system now makes a decision to render vertical if it will fit better and/or it shrinks the signature if it won't fit at all. This way you're assured that no matter what signature parameters you set and no matter the dimensions of your image, your signature won't clip off the edge and will be displayed as neatly as possible. I also enabled anti-aliasing and shadowing of the signature, so it should look as good as possible.

3. Fixed the page calculation so that previous/next are only displayed if necessary.

4. Added column to show how many albums (or subfolders) are in an album. This way if there are no images in that exact folder it doesn't look like it's just empty.

...the sorting is a fairly in-depth issue, so I've chosen to tackle it last. I've gotten a pretty good start on it, but it's FAR from straight-forward...

[TonyKInTexas]

Neat. Its looking good.

Can I get the update?

[DrebelHobbyist]

Version RC2 is now available. The changes are noted below.

1. Full Navigation now in the header bar of the gallery list. You can now navigate directly to anywhere in the gallery tree without having to use the browser back button.

2. More dynamic signatures. As suggested, the system now makes a decision to render vertical if it will fit better and/or it shrinks the signature if it won't fit at all. This way you're assured that no matter what signature parameters you set and no matter the dimensions of your image, your signature won't clip off the edge and will be displayed as neatly as possible. I also enabled anti-aliasing and shadowing of the signature, so it should look as professional and high quality as possible.

3. Fixed the page calculation so that previous/next are only displayed if necessary.

4. Added column to show how many albums (or subfolders) are in an album. This way if there are no images in that exact folder it doesn't look like it's just empty.

5. You now have the ability to sort images in the gallery by filename, lastWriteTime, or FileSize all either Ascending or Descending. You could sort by lastWriteTime descending to show off your newest pictures first!

[TonyKInTexas]

What about sorting folders? My folders are not sorted correctly and this causes some problems in navigation.

Thanks for the other changes. They look good.

Take care,

[MajorPain]

Hi there DrebelHobbyist,

Downloaded RC2 and using it at the moment seems that you have done a good job.. Just wanted to let you know im using your software a.t.m. and if i have some comments i sure let you know....


-- Cheers MajorPain --

[DrebelHobbyist]

Glad to hear it... now I want to see some links!! I've got several people running it, but I've yet to see someone elses images in it :)

...judging from the downloads, there are a LOT more of you out there using it. I wanna see! I wanna see!

[TonyKInTexas]

I don't run a public web server. That is what I pay my money for at pbase.com. :)

I run development servers at the house and is why I have been able to participate and help. :)

Take care,