sjlongland / tornado-gallery

Photo gallery written in Tornado

Photo gallery built on Tornado/Pillow

This is a simple photo gallery application built on Tornado and Pillow. It is intended to replace the CGI/ClearSilver based photo gallery application I wrote in C some time back.

Installation

$ python setup.py install --user

should do what you're after. Or you can install it system-wide. Your choice.

Deployment

To deploy you need:

1. A front-end server of some kind to do HTTP/HTTPS termination, etc, such as nginx or Apache.
2. A root directory where your photo galleries will be kept.
3. A writeable directory within that root called cache into which, the resized images will be placed on demand.
4. Some supervisor daemon that will launch the server at boot. systemd can do this, or for a stand-alone solution, look at supervisord.

The photos/galleries themselves need not be writeable by the daemon. The daemon process may run as any user you like.

Configure your supervisor daemon to launch the gallery application at boot, passing in the following arguments:

• Mandatory options:
  • --root-dir: the directory containing your photo galleries.
  • --listen-port; the port number to listen on (default is 8000)
• Optional:
  • --listen-address; the IP address of the listening socket (I suggest ::1)
  • --log-level; the logging level to use (default is INFO)
  • --process-count; the number of resizer processes to spawn (default: CPU count)
  • --template-path; the path where customised templates should be loaded form
  • --static-path; the directory where static resources are stored in
  • --static-uri; the URI where the static resources appear; default is /static

Now, point your server's reverse proxy at the port number you specified.

You may want to use your web server to host the /static directory by pointing it at the /static sub-directory of the installed package. e.g. on my Gentoo system installing it in my home directory, I would point /static my server at ~/.local/lib64/python3.4/site-packages/tornado_gallery-${VERSION}-${PYVER}.egg/tornado_gallery/static/.

Gallery format

A gallery is a directory with a number of images (in PNG or JPEG format) and a info.txt describing the gallery itself.

info.txt has the following format:

.title	Title Of Gallery Here
.desc	Description of Gallery Here

The key and value must be separated by a single tab character.

Individual photos may be annotated two ways.

Annotating photos in info.txt

To annotate photos in info.txt, list the photos and their descriptions separated by a tab:

photo1.jpg	Brief Description of photo1
photo2.jpg	Brief Description of photo2

Separate annotations

The annotations can also be stored in a separate file with the file extension replaced with .txt. This also lets you set parameters such as default width/height. If your photo is named photo1.jpg, create a file photo1.txt:

.annotation	Brief Description of photo1
.description	Further description of photo1

Other options that can be given here; .width and .height set the default dimensions of the photo.

Customising appearance

The photo gallery look and feel can be changed by specifying your own templates.

Copy the stock templates to a directory, customise, then point --template-path at that directory. Likewise, static elements such as CSS stylesheets, images and JavaScript may be customised by copying these to a separate directory and specifying --static-path.