Show HN: Photish, a simple multithreaded static photo portfolio generator

by hlawson • 11 years ago

29 12 11 years ago

hlawson7• 11 years ago

I created Photish as most of the static website generators I came across and used were text focused. The tooling, patterns and structure were geared towards sites with lots of text based content.

Photish is focused on photo based websites. Using a collection of albums in a folder, some templates defined in the language of your choice and some (optional) accompanying metadata in a YAML file, Photish will transcode your images into your desired formats (using ImageMagick) and parse and render the templates against your photo collection.

Transcoding large photo collections can take time, Photish does it's best to speed up this process by creating multiple threads to allow ImageMagick transcodes to run in parallel. It also caches all transcodes to avoid regeneration as you develop your site locally.

Try it out, let me know what you think! The project is in it's early days but it is in a working and performant state. Happy to take feature requests and or pull requests.

tombrossman• 11 years ago

Have you tried Sigal? http://sigal.saimon.org/en/latest/

I use Jekyll for static sites but for photo galleries Sigal is my go-to solution as it is fast and stable and works very well for generating a static photo gallery.

Nice work on the demo, too.

jamessb• 11 years ago

Expose looks very impressive, and was posted here 74 days ago:

https://github.com/Jack000/Expose

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376468

hlawson7• 11 years ago

I haven't tried Sigal, thanks for sharing the link. I'll check it out. What do you like about it?

I also use Jekyll, it has been the perfect tool for my blog.

jasondecastro• 11 years ago

Could we get screenshot examples?

hlawson7• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, it is on my to do. However for now, Photish itself is probably best showcased by running it and checking it out. After it is installed, an example/demo is provided by running:

photish init --example && photish host

Once I put together a nice template and some example sites I they would better showcase my HTML/CSS/JavaSCript and design skills rather then what Photish can do. Theoretically any design could be created using Photish as the templates and assets are completely up to you. The tool just takes care of the generation.

hlawson7• 11 years ago

As a temporary thing, I've added a screenshot of Photish running in the terminal :)

avitzurel• 11 years ago

Command line screenshots isn't really helping for a visual tool. With no screenshots or an online demo this requires a lot of work to just decide if it's useful or not.

Also, I haven't looked at the code but the first thing I do when looking at Ruby projects is look for test/spec directory. Kudos for having it and testing your library

hlawson7• 11 years ago

Completely agree, it is a place holder until I've put together my own site which I'll ideally demo there. I've spent all my time tweaking and improving Photish that I haven't had time to start the site that I wanted to create before I made the tool!

A demo is available running "photish init --example && photish host", the design is kinda embarrassing though so I wouldn't want people misjudging the possibilities of what you can create with my poor example site design :)

Thanks for poking around, testing is important to me too. There are also feature tests with cucumber/aruba in the /features directory.

hlawson7• 11 years ago

A demo site is here https://foinq.com/photish-montage/index.html

Show HN: Photish, a simple multithreaded static photo portfolio generator

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