Since my wife started working as a photographer on a daily basis the daily routine of getting all the pictures off the camera after a long day filled with photo shootings got her bored quickly.
Since we got some RaspberryPis to spare I gave it a try and created a small script which when the Pi gets powered on automatically copies all contents of the attached SD card to the houses storage server. Easy as Pi(e) – so to speak.
So this is now an automated process for a couple of weeks – she comes home, get’s all batteries to their chargers, drops the sd cards into the reader and poweres on the Pi. After it copied everything successfully the Pi sends an eMail with a summary report of what has been done. So far so good – everything is on our backuped storage server then.
Now the problem was that she often does not immediately starts working on the pictures. But she wants to take a closer look without the need to sit in front of a big monitor – like taking a look at her iPad in the kitchen while drinking coffee.
So what we need was a tool that does this:
- take a folder (the automated import folder) and get all images in there, order them by day
- display an overview per day of all pictures taken
- allow to see the fullsized picture if necessary
- work on any mobile or stationary device in the household – preferably html5 responsive design gallery
- it should be fast because commonly over 200 pictures are done per day
- it should be opensource because – well opensource is great – and probably we would need to tweak things a bit
Since I did not find anything near what we had in mind I sat down this afternoon and wrote a tool myself. It’s opensourced and available for you to play with it. Here’s a short description what it does:
It’s called GalleryServer and basically is an embedded http server which takes all .jpg files from a folder (configurable) and offers you some handy tool urls which respons with JSON data for you to work with. I’ve written a very small html user interface with a bit of javascript (using the great html5 kickstart) that allows you to see all available days and get a nice thumbnail overview of each day – when you click on it it opens the full-size image in a new window.
It’s pretty fast because it’s not actively resizing the images – instead it’s taking the thumbnail picture from the original jpg file which the camera placed there during storing the picture. It’s got some caching and can be run on any operating system where mono / .net is available – which is probably anything – even the RaspberryPi.
Source 1: my wifes page
Source 2: 99lime html5 kickstart boilerplate
Source 3: https://github.com/bietiekay/GalleryServer