Yet Another Photo Gallery

(designed to run on my raspberrypi :) )

This is essentially a pet project to get known with techniques like 'infinite scrolling' and tools like nginx, server-side Python, jinja, FastCGI.

Server-side, a Python script list pictures from a directory, build 'cropped' thumbnails and resize large picture (taking advantage of EXIF informations to rotate them if necessary). It outputs the gallery via jinja templates and FastCGI.

Client-side, I use jquery + jquery masonery to display the pictures and load asynchronously new ones when I reach the end of the page. lightbox is used to display larger pictures.

To use

• create a virtual environment and install the dependencies:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

• make static/media/photos point to your photos
• run the app with gunicorn (a single worker is required: the gallery keeps its thumbnail/vote caches in memory):

.venv/bin/gunicorn --chdir scripts --workers 1 --timeout 120 \
                   --bind 127.0.0.1:8083 photos:app

(you might want to run that in a screen/systemd unit to keep it alive -- see deploy/ for a ready-made systemd unit and nginx config). For quick local hacking you can also run the bundled development server: python3 scripts/photos.py (listens on 127.0.0.1:8083, override with PORT).

• I use the following configuration for nginx, proxying to gunicorn:

server {

	listen 80;
	server_name your.photo.gallery.org;

	# static files
	location ~ ^/(images|javascript|js|css|flash|media|static)/ {
	    root /var/www/photos/static;
	    expires 30d;
	}
	 

	location / {
	    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8083;
	    proxy_set_header Host $host;
	    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
	    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
	    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
	}
}

Captions

YAPG can display captions for your pictures: simply rename the image file to start with a @ character: everything after this character (excluding file extension!) will be used as a caption. Markdown syntax is even allowed!

(note that some characters are invalid in filenames, like /: in order to put links in your captions, you might want to use | instead, which is replaced automatically with / by YAPG).

Voting

Photo voting can be enabled per gallery by creating (touching) an empty .vote file in the desired photo directory.

A small, clickable star appears next to each image. Visitors can use it to 'favourite' one image. The vote tally per image is stored server-side in a file called .votes.json, one file per directory.

Editing

A /edit route mirrors the public gallery but lets you manage it: upload new pictures, delete existing ones, edit captions and create subfolders. Browse to /edit (or /edit/<some/gallery>) to enter edit mode.

It is gated behind HTTP Basic auth, with credentials taken from the environment. Edit mode is disabled unless both are set:

export YAPG_EDIT_USER=admin
export YAPG_EDIT_PASSWORD=a-strong-password

(with systemd, set these via Environment= in the unit -- see deploy/yapg.service).

Because Basic auth sends the password with every request, only ever expose /edit over HTTPS. Editing a caption simply renames the file using the @caption convention described above, so captions survive a switch back to read-only mode.