Photo Album

The photo album paradigm is album and package. A package is a collection of related photos. This could be a roll of film, an event, or just a trunk full of old photos you've scanned. The definition is arbitrary; but broadly is just a bunch of photographs you've decided to group for whatever reason. An album is a collection of packages.

The purpose of the photo_album application is to generate an HTML table of contents for the entire album as well as a thumbnail gallery and detail view for each package. The information needed to generate the HTML files is gathered from an SQLite database by reading the album and package directory contents

The database schema is in the database directory. It is a simple two-table structure that defines a one-to-many relationship between packages and photographs. Taken together, this database constitutes the album.

The configuration file album.cfg must be configured properly. The database must be created. Currently there no import functionality so you'll be enjoying some quality time with SQLite SQL92 syntax.

Installation

This is a work in progress. Install:

mkvirtualenv --python=python3 photo_album
pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py develop

Invoking

The application consists of several console scripts that perform distinct operations on packages in the album.:

mkcontents
mkdbtemplate
mkgallerytiff
mkgalleryjpeg
mkgallerycaption

mkdbtemplate produces database schema for each package to be used for populating the database for that package. It also has some facility for doing DB migrations as schema changes occur. It serves as a replacement for a front-end and will do nicely for now.

mkgallerytiff copies and scales the original TIFF images from the tiff directory into the gallery-tiff directory. If there is a crop value present in the database, the image will be cropped as described. Note that if cropping occurs, mkdbtemplate must be run again to capture the new crop marks. The SQL must also be invoked again to populate the database.

Manual cropping must be performed after this console script has been run. This is not true if mkgallerytiff is being run after a previous crop and the new cropping is done automatically. Of course, in some cases, cropping is not appropriate.

The photo album does expect to work with square thumbnail images. If you choose to not crop, subsequent steps will pad the images appropriately and everything will work out.

mkgalleryjpeg converts the cropped TIFF images to JPEG with no scaling. These are suitable for producing prints. This command will also produce the thumbnails needed for the thumbnail gallery.

mkgallerycaption processes the cropped gallery TIFF images to JPEG and places the photo ID as a caption on the image. The resolution is the same as the gallery TIFF images. These images are suitable for a printed index.

mkcontents combines packages it finds on the filesystem with data from the database and produces an album table of contents and for each package produces a thumbnail gallery and detail view. This command must be run last once all the previous processing steps have been performed.

Run the application like this:

mkcontents --config album.cfg

HOWTO

There are things you might want to do and here's how to do 'em.

You want to change the size of the gallery-tiff images

mkdbtemplate will create a SQL file template for each package in the build directory. If run with the -p PKG flag it will operate on a single package. I find it most convenient to run it against a single package. The photoid column in the photographs table is populated from the rename_map.txt file in the tiff directory. The rename_map.txt file comes from the photo-rename project and contains a mapping from old filename to new filename. The new filename is taken and used as the photoid. The jpeg directory is read for filenames and must be populated before running the mkdbtemplate command. Here is a quick way to create the JPEG files from TIFF:

for tiff in ../tiff/*.tif
do
    fn=${tiff#../tiff/*}
    newfn=${fn%*.tif}.jpg
    convert_cmd="convert $tiff $newfn"
    echo $convert_cmd
    $convert_cmd
done

This shell example makes use of the ImageMagick software suite, namely the convert utility.

This code is a mess. The rename_map.txt file may contain an inline comment. If present, the comment is used as the description column.

Once the SQL is generated and hand-crafted to your satisfaction, just run it against your database:

sqlite3 albumdb.sqlite < PKG-PHOTOS.sql

mkgallerytiff will check to see if crop marks have been saved in the photographs table for this photograph. If so, it will check the height against the configured height in the gallery_height configuration parameter. If these are different, a new scale factor will be computed. Crop marks will be adjusted and saved in DB. The new scale factor will be used against the source photograph. After resize, the photograph will be cropped against the new crop marks. The target resolution is in the configuration file. The scale factor will be calculated after comparing the target resolution with the source image resolution.

Editing and Building the Templates

See the README in the templates directory for details.