AlephZarro

Do you want to have photo albums (on your site)? I did. I wanted a comfortable but not “over-web20-ized” user experience, and above all, simple and pragmatic content management/control.

Believe or not, nothing I came across was just the right thing. Too heavy, too weak, too ajaxy, unacceptable license, etc. At the end of the day I found out I had not had to look too far. Ondrej Jaura (a good friend of mine) created a simple command-line album generator - Rhotoalbum. Bonus: it is written in ruby :)
You treat your images as ordinary files in directories (which stand for albums) and run a generation command. That’s all you need to do. You add new images or change something? Just run the same script - anytime. It creates necessary thumbnails, and simple style-able index pages. For slideshow purposes it (optionally) integrates with nice TripTracker.

My way of appreciation of my Ondrej’s great work was … to contribute the project and help out in making it better. This resulted into a release of a new stable version 0.3 these days.

Well, I started this post saying I wanted some place for our photos to show them to friends occasionally. Here is are our Rhoto photo gallery. Another showcase for Rhotoalbum is Ondrej’s photo gallery.