subPhotoFloat is an open source web photo gallery aimed at sleekness and speed. It keeps with a minimalist philosophy, preferring to work over directory structures rather than bloated photo database management software (there are good options available for that, if you want it). Everything it generates is static, which means it's extremely fast.
[Check out a demo!](https://photos.derdritte.net/#!/random)
The Python script scans a directory tree of images, whereby each directory constitutes an album. It then populates a second folder, known as the cache folder with statically generated JSON files and thumbnails. The scanner extracts metadata from EXIF tags in JPEG photos. subPhotoFloat is smart about file and directory modification time, so you are free to run the scanner script as many times as you want, and it will be very fast if there are few or zero changes since the last time you ran it.
Also a part of the Python script is a small flask webapp which allows you to have authentication for certain albums/images and can start the scanner.
The JavaScript application consists of a single `index.html` file with a single `scripts.min.js` and a single `styles.min.css`. It fetches the statically generated JSON files and thumbnails on the fly from the `cache` folder to create a speedy interface. Features include:
This simply runs all the javascript through Google Closure Compiler and all the CSS through YUI Compressor to minify and concatenate everything. Be sure you have java installed.
Now that we're in the web directory, let's make a folder for cache and a folder for the pictures:
$ mkdir albums
$ mkdir cache
When you're done, fill albums with photos and directories of photos. You can also use symlinks. Run the static generator (you need Python≥2.6 and the Python Imaging Library):
$ cd ../scanner
$ ./main.py ../web/albums ../web/cache
After it finishes, you will be all set. Simply have your web server serve pages out of your web directory. You may want to do the scanning step in a cronjob, if you don't use the deployment makefiles mentioned below.
For easy updates `albums` and `cache` can be set to also live in \<deployment-folder>, this is especially recommended if you are using the optional flask app mentioned in the following section.
Do **not** keep any of your config or python-files where the webserver can read or write to, the `deployment-config.mk` is most sensitive. If you only want the static html/json & javascript application you are done now!
## Optional: Server-side Authentication using flask
The JavaScript application uses a very simple API to determine if a photo can be viewed or not. If a JSON file returns error `403`, the album is hidden from view. To authenticate, `POST` a username and a password to `/auth`. If unsuccessful, `403` is returned. If successful, `200` is returned, and the previously denied json files may now be requested. If an unauthorized album is directly requested in a URL when the page loads, an authentication box is shown.
subPhotoFloat ships with an optional server side component called FloatApp to facilitate this, which lives in `scanner/floatapp`. It is a simple Flask-based Python web application.
### Installation
We need to install flask and other dependencies, ideally in a virtualenv, as this will keep your system-wide python installation clean and you can easily install more packages or different versions.
$ cd scanner
$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
### Edit the app.cfg configuration file
$ vim floatapp/app.cfg
Give this file a correct username and password for an admin, as well as a secret token. The admin user is allowed to call `/scan`, which automatically runs the scanner script mentioned in the previous section.
In `app.cfg` you may also add elements to the `PERMISSION_MAP` as follows. The dictionary takes any path (to either an album or an image) and restricts any album or image matching that path to the listed tokens.
Tokens can contain anything you wish and you can add as many paths and tokes as you require. One match in the `PERMISSION_MAP` will allow access even if another rule would forbid it. The admin is allowed to see any album or image.
### Configure nginx
FloatApp makes use of `X-Accel-Buffering` and [X-Accel-Redirect](https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/x-accel/) to force the server-side component to have minimal overhead when serving images via flask. Here is an example nginx configuration that can be tweaked:
Note that the `internal-*` paths must match that of `app.cfg`, since the flask app will redirect the "external" `/albums` and `/cache` paths to internal ones set in that config.
Both the scanner and the webpage have a `make deploy` target, and the scanner has a `make scan` target, to automatically deploy assets to a remote server and run the scanner. For use, customize `deployment-config.mk` in the root of the project, and carefully read the `Makefile`s to learn what's happening.
If you have any suggestions, feel free to contact the subPhotoFloat community via [our mailing list](http://lists.zx2c4.com/mailman/listinfo/photofloat). We're open to adding all sorts of features and working on integration points with other pieces of software.
Note: As the project is 8+ years old, the mailing list has slowed down a bit, if you do not get an answer immediately, please be patient and give other users some time to respond.
This app is also fairly small, so this might be the perfect project to try and add some small features yourself. For reference you may want to look at the flask & nginx documentation.
