jigl wins the gallery generation wars
I’ve investigated a number of different web image-gallery generators for my site. My primary requirements are that the system generate static HTML and images (i.e., no CGI, no PHP, no MySQL, no SSI, none of that dynamic crap), that it scale large images and provide links to the unscaled versions, and that it not look like crap.
For a while, I used fgg, which, when hacked a bit, produced reasonable results. But it had some irritations: namely, it scaled images by a size ratio, rather than to a particular size. And, while I liked its minimalism, I was looking for something a bit less spartan.
igal is a nice tool, but it didn’t do scaling the way I liked, either. And none of the preset layouts really cried out to me. (I do use it when assembling sets of graphs for my independent work, however.)
Today, I stumbled on jigl, which is amazing. It’s a single perl script, the site supplies a wonderfully subtle background theme (the default isn’t as attractive), and it does image scaling almost the way I like it (it accepts a target Y value, rather than a target X value, for reasons I can’t quite fathom.)
I plan to use it for future collections—especially subsets of the photos in the photos section, like this one.