Kallery - An image gallery generator for KDE

Contents

1. Introduction (You may skip this.)
2. Features
3. Requirements
4. Compilation
5. Downloads
6. Known issues, notes (Please read this chapter!)
7. Changelog
8. Screen shots

1. Introduction

The idea of Kallery came up in my mind when I've started to redesign my homepage. I'm an amateur photographer, and have a lot of photos scanned. It is a pain to build a web gallery for them, even with a html editor, not talking about the generated code by such editors. So I tried some gallery generator programs, both for Linux and Windows, but none of them produced a gallery what I liked, and what I could use later on my homepage. I planned for a long time ago, that it's really the time to start learning something new, and to (permanently) change to the excellent Linux OS, and now that was the right moment for doing this. And I started to read and tried to understand the (not so difficult) API of the QT and KDE. And here is the result, the Kallery - image gallery generator. Altough my homepage is not (yet) updated, it soon will be, and of course, I will use my little application. But as I saw, a lot of people downloaded the application, and I think, that it's not so good, that all I can provide to them is a link to the source package, and there is no homepage at all.

The licence is GPL, and it's copyrighted by me, Mantia András.

2. Features

• load a set of images (from different directories)
• convert them to another format, resize them and insert copyright text on them
• create thumbnails for them
• add descriptions for the images
• create a gallery html file, which contains the thumbnails
• this gallery format can have different look and feel (by using templates)
• insert navigation buttons, text descriptions near the fullsize images
• save the project, so you can use later to regenerate the same or slightly different (eg. descriptions in other languages) image gallery

Of course the majority of the above features are optional, and there are also some other things that you can use to customise your image gallery. The result is in the majority of the cases ready for publishing, altough it's always better to check the files, and make other customisations, if needed.

3. Requirements

As I wrote I choose Linux/KDE/QT (mainly because I use those at my home, and I use KDE/QT also at my work. But I also made this choice due to licensing issues. One other choice I've made was the use of ImageMagick. This came from the fact that first I wrote a bash script to convert my images, and it used the "convert" from ImageMagick. I liked it, it's powerful, works with a lot of image formats. But see the known issues... So here is the list of required applications/libraries:

• TrollTech's QT, version 2.2.x or 2.3.x
• KDE 2.x
• ImageMagick 5.3.x or 5.4.x

4. Compilation

After you've downloaded Kallery, you must compile it. I don't provide binary packages, due to the diversity of platforms it can run on. But if you build such packages, feel free to e-mail me, I will put a link on this page to the binary package. For compilation you need the same tools as for KDE compilation, most of them should be included with your distribution. Check also the KDE compilation FAQ and read the generic installation instructions from the INSTALL file (after you've unpacked the distributed package with the "tar xfzv kallery-x.y.z.tar.gz" command. Substitute x.y.z with the release number.)

A hint: use the --enable-debug switch for the ./configure script, because it helps if for some reason the application crashes.

• SuSE Linux 7.1 with QT 2.3.1, KDE 2.2.1 and ImageMagick 5.3.9
• Solaris 2.6 with QT 2.3.1, KDE 2.2.1 and ImageMagick 5.4.0

5. Downloads

6. Known issues, notes

• The ./configure script is not searching for ImageMagick, so the compilation will fail if it doesn't find the headers and libraries of it. You may need to use the --with-extra-includes and --with-extra-libs options and provide the correct path to the ImageMagick files in order to compile Kallery. Also this libraries must be the same what Kallery is trying to load during startup (check with "ldd kallery").
• Strange problems with ImageMagick... Kallery crashes when calls the ReadImage function of the ImageMagick library. It happens for any file, doesn't matter if it is supported (is valid) by ImageMagick or not. It may be due to multiple ImageMagick libraries on the system. Needs further investigation, but similar problems were reported on the ImageMagick mailing list.

• a description how does it happened
• the used versions of KDE, QT, ImageMagick, and the compiler
• a backtrace
• the output written to the terminal window
• the saved project file (I can figure out the used settings from it)
• the problem file, if it happens for only a single file

Wishes and patches are also welcome. My code may look ugly and may contain some unusual things for an experienced KDE developer, but that's life...this is my first KDE application.

7. Changelog

• more error/warning checks and message boxes introduced
• possibility to cancel the generation process

• save/load projects
• multiple templates (the selection is still hardcoded)
• no need of libMagick++
• more stable