An Elegant Little Picture Gallery Application

Every now and again I stumble upon something special that I wasn't expecting. This is one of those occasions. I was looking for an easy to maintain way of displaying cool wallpapers that I find. I could do a similar thing in Drupal with views but I just can't get close on the "simple to maintain" part.

There's an art in thinking through a project to the point of making it ridiculously easy to use. Often those projects don't look very good. It's an extension of that art to not only make it simple to use, but look very good too. I'm talking about a standalone PHP gallery script called Single File PHP Gallery by Kenny Svalgaard.

So what makes this special? First it doesn't need a database, it's entirely contained in a single PHP file. All you need to do to use it, is upload it to a webserver with php and php-gd (to manipulate the images and create thumbnails) enabled, then upload your gallery images to the same folder. That's it. No tricks.

When you download it, it comes as index.php (you can rename it anything you like) and a readme explaining the parameters. It detects new images automatically, it recognizes folders as new galleries and builds them like the folder tree on your local machine. You can change the directory it pulls images from too. This is handy if you're using a localhost webserver, you can have it display your LOCAL images in gallery form. How cool is that? You can do stuff like choose a particular image for that gallery, or have it show additional details for each gallery or image. Those are kinda clunky but they do work.

For a look at what I did with it, check my images page. Offhand I don't think I changed any of the settings. What you see is the results of how this glorious little script worked it's magic.

The gallery script has options for moving through them, previous, next etc as well as getting extra information which rearranges the layout to provide a sidebar. It had an actual size option too as well as a bigger preview image when clicked. All of those can be tweaked by looking at the readme file, although I found the defaults to be pretty damn good.

There is a EULA on this little gem, in that you are required to pay for commercial use. This is so incredibly simple to maintain that if you have any need for an image gallery, I'd seriously check it out. I had done this type of thing in Drupal for a few sites. It doesn't take that long to build. It does take a LOT more effort to add new galleries or images. You simply can't get easier than uploading a folder (or folders within folders within folders) in one swoop via FTP to the server. Usually you have to jump through some extra hoops in the admin section of an application to add galleries.

It takes something special to be lightweight, perfectly targeted and so simple your cat could use it to share images of her kittens with the extended family.