Generate HTML Photo Gallery in a Pinch with llgal

Productivity Sauce

There are plenty of powerful open source web-based applications for sharing photos out there. But if you need to publish a bunch of photos on the web as a simple static HTML gallery without all the bells and whistles, a command-line tool like llgal can come in rather handy. This little tool is available in the software repositories of many popular Linux distributions, so you can install it in a pinch. Using llgal to generate an HTML gallery couldn't be easier: in the terminal, switch to a folder containing photos, and run the llgal command. This creates a gallery using default settings. However, llgal supports a handful of options you can use to tweak its behavior and the resulting output. Using the -d option, you can specify the target directory, while the --exclude option allows you to exclude the photos that match specific criteria. The -R option can be useful if you want llgal to include subdirectories into the final gallery. To give the gallery a name, use the --title option as follows: --title "Garden Flowers." llgal doesn't generate thumbnails, so if the source directory contains large image files, it's a good idea to limit their width and height to a specific size. This can be done using the --sx and --sy options. And you can use the --exif option to display EXIF metadata for each photo. To sum up, here is an example:

llgal --exif --li -L -R --title "Garden Flowers" --sx 800 --sy 600

To see a list of all available options supported by llgal, run the llgal --help command. Obviously, llgal won't replace full-blown photo sharing applications like Piwigo, but it can help you to quickly set up a simple photo gallery with a minimum of fuss.