The BINS Photo Album is a package to
generate static web pages from the command line. Why would you want to
do this? Well, most of the dynamic web photo albums require that the
server do all the work when the client requests the images, thus either
slowing it down, or requiring a very beefy server. Also, you introduce
the chance for a script-kiddie from hacking your site. Not good.
Enter BINS. Some of its features include [from the web
page]:
-
generated album is static : it’s just plain HTML/CSS/Javascript
files (Javascript is not mandatory to view the album), no need of
any dynamic language (php, asp, etc.) nor database on server side.
Album can be burned on CD or DVD.
-
album can contains other albums (sub albums): the album can have
a tree structure ;
-
generation of a thumbnail and of scaled images for each
picture ;
-
generated album appearance is fully customizable by using HTML
templates (5 different templates sets are currently provided) and
configuration parameters: colors, number and size of thumbnails
per page, number and size of scaled pictures (in pixels or
percentage of the original image for the size), fields to display,
etc. Those parameters can be set globally (system wide or per
user), per album or sub album or per picture (for example,
you can change the colors of one sub album or one just one picture
page in an album by editing its description file) ;
-
several description fields (date, location, etc…) can be
associated with the pictures (in text or HTML format). You can
easily add or customize these fields ;
-
description fields can be set or modified via a command line
interface or a GTK+/GNOME-based GUI ;
-
A search engine is included in the album : you can find some
pictures by searching keywords in their description fields.
-
Album can be generated from pictures managed by
Zoph.
-
speed up album browsing by performing a clean up of HTML code to
reduce its size and by pre-loading thumbnails in browser cache
using JavaScript code ;
-
Exif information and Digital camera support :
- use the EXIF data structure found on some image files (usually,
those produced by digital cameras) to fill automatically some
fields (date and time for example).
- BINS use the Orientation EXIF tag (which is normally set when
you rotate a image on you DigiCam) to rotate the picture to
correct orientation.
- For each image, a page provides all information available on the
picture and the DigiCam settings when the photo was taken.
- Additional information are provided for Canon DigiCams.
- Tooltips provide information about the meaning of some of the
fields.
- All EXIF information is saved in the XML description file,
preventing they disappear when the image is modified ;
-
internationalization (generation of album in different
languages) using gettext. Current languages supported are Catalan,
Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finish, French, German, Hungarian,
Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Traditional Chinese
;
-
customizable charset encoding for HTML generation, including
UTF-8 (Unicode) support by default. Generation of the Apache
.htaccess file for correct encoding charset in HTTP headers ;
-
use of XML files to save user description of pictures and
albums/subalbums and Exif data from image file ;
-
handle correctly file and directory names with spaces or other odd
characters (excepted ‘/’), and create valid escaped URLs ;
-
generate valid HTML/XHTML code. The level of HTML depends of the
style used. Some of the styles are valid, table free XHTML.