Galleroo 3.4
readme
Galleroo is a web image gallery, or web album, creator for Windows (NT, 2000 and XP) with a unique preview feature and support for movies and annotation. It provides an easy and quick way to automatically create thumbnail web galleries. Built both for the novice and the advanced webmaster, Galleroo is bundled with ready made gallery layouts and provides an easy way to create custom gallery layouts using HTML or XSL templates. You can view example galleries at xyster.net
Galleroo is donation-ware. If you find Galleroo useful and would like to help the author in his efforts, you can drop a few coins in his tip jar.
Commercial users of Galleroo are required to contribute $10 U.S. For further information regarding the commercial use of Galleroo you may contact the author.
Generally, Galleroo should be easy to use. If there is something you don't immediately understand you can probably ignore it. Galleroo will prompt you if it requires more information to create a gallery. If the documentation in this page does not answer your questions, you can ask questions, submit comments and request features in the Galleroo forums.
The style tells Galleroo how to lay out the created image gallery and how the layout should interact with the user. Using different styles, Galleroo can produce practically any layout imaginable. In addition to the layout, a style can be further customized through options which appear in the Galleroo options interface located at the center of the Galleroo window.
Styles can be selected from the rightmost list box located at the top of the Galleroo window.
Currently, Galleroo comes with five styles. You can create more styles in two ways. You can use the Digum style to process HTML templates of your own creation. Read about the Digum stylesheet in the intermediate tinkering page. Alternatively, if you have experience creating XSL stylesheets, you can read the advanced tinkering page.
Style options allow you to further customize the look and feel of your image gallery. Options are in the table in the Galleroo window. You can select and change options by clicking on them. Galleroo will then provide you with a convenient way to change them. Keep in mind that styles can have different options and Galleroo only displays the options relevant to the currently selected style.
Many options have defaults which are usually the recommended values for the style. If you choose not to explicitly specify a value for an option, Galleroo will use the default. Galleroo displays an option default, if there is one, in parentheses following the value you entered for the option.
The cells marked with a +, on left-most column of the option table, allow you rearrange the order of the options in the table. Clicking the + will raise the option one row.
Themes allow you to store the options that you choose for your image galleries. You can create and maintain multiple themes for various styles and style options.
Themes can be selected from the list box located at the top left of the Galleroo window. New themes can be created simply by typing a new theme name in the theme selection box and pressing enter.
One of Galleroo's unique features is automatic preview. When the preview feature is enabled, Galleroo will display a preview of what the created gallery will look like using the currently selected style and theme. The preview will be updated automatically whenever you change the theme, style or an option.
Preview can be toggled by clicking the button at the bottom of the Galleroo window.
Press the 'Go!' button to generate the image gallery using the selected style and theme. While Galleroo is generating the gallery, the 'Go!' button will change to a 'Stop' button that you can use to stop Galleroo. Alternately, while Galleroo is working, you can start working on the settings for the next gallery you wish to create. You will have to wait for the 'Go!' button to display 'Go!' again to start generating the next gallery.
Galleroo will signal that it is done generating the image gallery by return the 'Go!' button and filling the progress bar to the maximum. Once Galleroo is finished generating the image gallery, you can press the 'View Gallery' button on the bottom right of the Galleroo window to open a new browser window with the gallery in it.
You will find all the gallery files in the folder you specified in the 'Gallery Folder' option (the 'Gallery Folder' option is described below). To view the gallery in your web browser, open the file named 'index.html'.
When the 'Generate HTML Only' checkbox (at the bottom of the Galleroo window) is selected, Galleroo will only regenerate the HTML for the gallery. This mode of operation is several orders of magnitude faster than the normal mode. If the thumbnails, gallery images and original images are already in the gallery folder, from a previous run, the new "tweaked" gallery will use these. This allows you to quickly tweak style options without having to wait for the time consuming image generation after every tweak.
these options appear in all styles
|
option |
description |
|---|---|
| Source Folder | folder containing the images you want to create a gallery for |
| Gallery Folder | destination folder where you wish to place the newly created gallery |
| Thumb Size | size of the thumbnails that galleroo should create |
| Image Size | size of the gallery images that galleroo should create (if you set this option to 0, Galleroo will copy the original images unaltered) |
| Thumb Quality | JPEG quality to use for saving thumbnails (must be between 0 and 100, default is 75) |
| Image Quality | JPEG quality to use for saving gallery images (must be between 0 and 100, default is 75) |
Optional Style Options
these options may appear in some styles and not in others
|
option |
description |
|---|---|
| Title | title you would like to give the gallery, often appears as the title in the created gallery |
| Sub Title | subtitle you would like to give the gallery, often appears as the subtitle in the created gallery |
| Sort By | the order in which Galleroo should place images in the created gallery, currently either by image creation date or alphabetically by image name |
| Nav Alignment | tells Galleroo where to place the navigation bar in a frame based gallery |
| Do Thumb Slider | is set to yes, instructs Galleroo to create a clickable thumbnail slider on slide pages |
| Do Three Stage | if set to yes, instructs Galleroo to copy the original images to the gallery folder and provide links to them in the created gallery |
| Do Auto Play Movies | if set to yes, movies will start immediately when they are displayed |
| Columns Per Index | in thumbnail-table oriented styles, specifies the number of thumbnail columns every index page in the gallery should have |
| Rows Per Index | in thumbnail-table oriented styles, specifies the number of thumbnail rows every index page in the gallery should have |
| Background Image | image to use for the background of the created gallery in a frameless gallery |
| Nav Background Image | image to use for the backrground of the navigation bar in a frame based gallery |
| Slide Background Image | image to use for the background of the slide frame in a frame based gallery |
| Background Color | color to use for the background of the created gallery in a frameless gallery |
| Nav Background Color | color to use for the background of the navigation bar in a frame based gallery |
| Slide Background Color | color to use for the background of the slide frame in a frame based gallery |
| Font | font to use for text in the created gallery. Note that the color choice in the font dialog does not affect the color of the text! |
| Text Color | color to use for text in the created gallery |
| Link Color | color to use for links in the created gallery |
| Active Link Color | color to use for active links (links being clicked) in the created gallery |
| Visited Link Color | color to use for visited links in the created gallery |
| Home Image | image to use for the link that returns to the parent of the current page |
| Next Image | image to use for the link that proceeds to the next image in the gallery |
| Previous Image | image to use for the link that returns to the previous image in the gallery |
| Blank Image | image used to maintain proper page formatting when a 'next image' or 'previous image' cannot be displayed since there is no neighboring image in the gallery |
| Html File Prefix | text to prefix to all HTML files created for the gallery. This option allows you to maintain two galleries in the same folder and different layouts that share the same images and thumbnails |
| Custom CSS File | custom CSS file to include in the created HTML files. This option allows you to further customize the created Galleries appearence beyond what can be done through Galleroo's interface |
Web galleries created by Galleroo can include image titles, captions and comments. Adding annotation for Galleroo's use is done by creating text files in the gallery source folder where the original images are. The easiest way is to create a gallery with the 'Tiqur' style, click the 'View Gallery' button and follow the instructions in the gallery. Once you have completed the steps described in it, you can proceed to create your gallery of choice, fully annotated.
Or you can create the files manually in two different methods. The first method is to create a text file for every image in the folder. The second method aggregates the information for all images in one file.
In the first method an annotation file is named after the file it describes with the addition of a '.txt' suffix. For example, if the image is 'dsc00120.jpg', the corresponding annotation file is 'dsc00120.jpg.txt'. The first line in the file is the title of the image, the second line is the caption (or subtitle) and from the third line onwards is the comment. For example:
Sun City Where the sun never sets I took this picture in 1992 when I visited Sun City for 3 weeks |
Broken down:
|
Line # |
Purpose | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Title |
Sun City |
| 2 | Caption |
Where the sun never sets |
| 3 | Comment |
I took this picture in 1992 when I visited |
| 4 |
Sun City for 3 weeks |
In the second method there is only one annotation file, named 'info.txt'. The file contains a section for each image to describe. Sections are seperated by an empty line. The first line of a section is the name of the image file, the second line is the title, the third is the caption and the fourth line onward is the comment. Because sections are seperated by an empty line, comments may not contain empty lines in them.
In the example below, there are two sections corresponding to two images.
dsc00120.jpg Sun City Where the sun never sets I took this picture in 1992 when I visited Sun City for 3 weeks dsc00121.jpg Moon City Where the moon never rises I took this picture in 1993 when I visited Moon City for 3 hours |
Broken down:
|
Line # |
Purpose | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | File Name 1 |
dsc00120.jpg |
| 2 | Title 1 |
Sun City |
| 3 | Caption 1 |
Where the sun never sets |
| 4 | Comment 1 |
I took this picture in 1992 when I visited |
| 5 |
Sun City for 3 weeks |
|
| 6 | Empty Line | |
| 7 | File Name 2 |
dsc00121.jpg |
| 8 | Title 2 |
Moon City |
| 9 | Caption 2 |
Where the moon never rises |
| 10 | Comment 2 |
I took this picture in 1993 when I visited |
| 11 |
Moon City for 3 hours |
In either method, with the exception of file names, you may leave an empty line in place of a field you do not wish to fill in. You can combine both annotation methods by having both an 'info.txt' file and individual annotation files for some of the images. Please note that in this case, the annotation in the individual files takes precedence over the annotation in the 'info.txt' file.
You may only annotate with text, HTML will be converted into text and will not work as HTML.
Web galleries created by Galleroo can be further customized through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Galleroo creates default CSS files based on the options you select through the Galleroo interface. In addition, you can edit your own CSS file and have Galleroo include it by using the 'Custom CSS File' option described above.
Several builtin gallery classes are defined to ease customization
| class | where it is applied |
|---|---|
| thumb | All thumbnails |
| thumb-table | Table that holds thumbnails |
| index-page | Page that displays thumbnails |
| slide | All images |
| slide-page | Page that displays an image |
If you are comfortable with HTML you can create your own fully customized gallery styles. Read about the Digum stylesheet here. If you need even more control and are comfortable with XSL, read about creating your own XSL stylesheets for Galleroo here.
Galleroo is donation-ware and can be redistributed freely on the condition that it be redistributed unmodified and in its entirety (the Galleroo program, the list program, XSL stylesheets, plugins, this readme and any other file included with Galleroo).
Commercial use of Galleroo is strictly prohibited. For further information regarding commercial use of Galleroo you may contact the author.
Copyright
Galleroo and anything else provided with it is copyright 2000-2003, xyster.net, all rights reserved, unless otherwise stated.
Disclaimer
This software or any part of it is not guaranteed to do anything and is not guaranteed not to harm your computer. Use this software at your own risk.
Reporting Bugs, Questions and Comments
If you find any bugs or have questions, comments or requests, you can visit the Galleroo forums.
If you would like a new style for Galleroo, please provide an HTML mockup of the desired gallery.
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