PyGall is a simple web photo gallery written in Python and built on the Pyramid web framework.

PyGall is licensed under a BSD permissive license.

Code is hosted on github: https://github.com/bbinet/PyGall.

Be warned that this image gallery is beta software, and not full featured. It has been developped to fit my own needs, and may not suit your wishes.

But that being said, feel free to report bugs or ask for new features at https://github.com/bbinet/PyGall/issues. Even better, since the code is hosted on github, feel free to fork and send pull requests.

PyGall currently provides the following features:

• Browse and view photos through a nice interface borrowed from Galleria.
• Bulk upload of photos through the browser using jQuery-File-Upload. The photos are automatically scaled and rotated if needed.
• If using F-Spot as your personal photo management desktop application, PyGall provides a script to automatically import photos from F-Spot and keep in sync your PyGall gallery.
• Administer your PyGall gallery via a dedicated interface that let you update photo metadata such as date, rating, or description. You can also delete photos, or organize them through tags (which will soon be used to provide different views in PyGall).
• Allow templates override so that the user interface can be easily customized to your needs.

For upcoming features, you can have a look at https://github.com/bbinet/PyGall/blob/master/TODO.txt

Prior to actually install PyGall and its dependencies, you should install the libjpeg and python development files, which are needed to compile the Python Imaging Library dependency. On Debian Linux you can do:

$ sudo aptitude install build-essential libjpeg-dev python-dev

You should have a working setuptools (or distribute) environment. I advise you to use virtualenv to create an isolated Python environment. On Linux you can do:

$ wget https://raw.github.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py 
$ python virtualenv.py --no-site-packages venv

This will create a virtual environment named venv that we'll use to install PyGall. See http://www.virtualenv.org for more information on virtualenv.

So let's install PyGall in the freshly created venv:

$ venv/bin/pip install PyGall

PyGall is now installed. We need to make a configuration file for your PyGall photo gallery. The easiest way is to copy the file from the PyGall repository and customize it to your needs:

$ wget https://raw.github.com/bbinet/PyGall/master/production.ini

First, you should edit production.ini and set a unique random value for the authtkt_secret (instead of the ̀ changeme` default value) to guard against the theft of authentication session.

This production.ini file will be used by Paster to initialize the application, create the database, and serve your application.

So you need to setup PyGall, generate a configuration for authentication (auth.cfg) and create the database (PyGall.db):

$ venv/bin/python -m pygall.scripts.setup production.ini

And finally, you can serve your PyGall application:

$ venv/bin/paster serve production.ini

That's all, you can point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:6543 and start using PyGall.

By default, the following 2 user accounts are set up:

An administrator account

login: admin
password: admin

A guest account

login: guest
password: guest

$ htpasswd -n john

Log in as administrator and you're ready to import your first photos!

By default, when anonymous, you will be prompted for login: only registered users will be allowed to view the gallery.

If you want to allow any anonymous user to view the gallery, you can set allow_anonymous = true in the production.ini config file.

Once logged in, you will be redirected to the PyGall gallery index page. Then if you are part of the admin group, you will be allowed both to upload new photos and to edit, delete existing photos. For that purpose, you can go through the 'Upload' and 'Admin' link in the upper right corner of the gallery.

If you are using F-spot as your personnal photo management desktop application, you can rather choose to use the F-spot synchronization script provided with PyGall to import photos coming from F-spot directly in your gallery. To use it, simply run the following command:

$ venv/bin/python -m pygall.scripts.fspot_sync --fspot-photosdir=/path/to/fspot/photos production.ini

By default, all photos that have the tag 'pygall' will be imported in your gallery. Pass --help option to see all possible options:

$ venv/bin/python -m pygall.scripts.fspot_sync --help

If you want to share your gallery to other people, please refer to the previous note to create new user accounts.

Note that PyGall has been internationalized, and is available in both french and english languages. To change the current locale, you can set the _LOCALE_ parameter in the query string of the current url. So the url would look like:

http://127.0.0.1:6543/?_LOCALE_=en

or:

http://127.0.0.1:6543/?_LOCALE_=fr

You can easily customize the look and feel of the PyGall gallery by overriding some mako templates and providing your own static resources (css, images).

To override some default PyGall templates, you have to update your production.ini and uncomment the line:

templates_dir = %(here)s/custom_templates

Then create the custom_templates directory, and put some mako templates in there. For example, you can copy the default PyGall templates from https://github.com/bbinet/PyGall/tree/master/pygall/templates and update them as needed.

If you want to include some static resources, you can also activate a new static view by uncommenting the line:

static_dir = %(here)s/custom_static

Then create the custom_static directory, and put some static files in there. You can now access these static resources from your mako templates with something like:

${request.static_url(request.registry.settings['static_dir'] + /path/to/resource')}

If the customization of the look and feel is not enough, you can go further and create a new Pyramid application which extends PyGall.

Thus you can use all the flexibility of the Pyramid web framework to make your own application and use PyGall views internally.

Please refer to the Pyramid web framework documentation to know more about application customization.