static_page_generator

A static photo gallery generator for photographers. See it live at jduarte.eu.

Running

Warning

This is meant to be used with actual photo files that contain camera metadata - probably won't work well with random images.

Dump your favourite photos in data/images/. Add markdown files to data/pages/ and those files are turned into sections in your gallery.

If you're unsure how these translate into the website layout, you can find example content in example_content/. Copy it with

$ cp -r example_content/* data/

Create your config file from the example and adjust it to your liking (site title, which tags show up as sections, etc.)

$ cp config.example.toml config.toml

Then run the server with

$ make run

Your gallery is now available at http://localhost:8080.

You can then replace the content over at data with your own.

Other commands that might come in handy:

$ make generate  # fully regenerates the website structure
$ make thumbnails  # generates thumbnails (smaller sized versions of your photos that show up on the index)

Development

For development, you're going to need uv. Once you have that, install the virtual environment with

$ uv sync

Then run the server with

$ docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build

This regenerates the website structure whenever you tweak a template or style and serves it as you go.

Use

$ uv run python src/main.py -h

to see available commands.

How it works

The generator has two generating behaviours: text pages and image galleries.

Text pages are HTML pages converted from Markdown documents. These should be stored inside the data/pages directory. See the about.md document for an example.

Photo galleries are generated from photos containing keyword data and camera metadata (shutter speed, aperture, etc). A section is generated for every keyword containing the pictures with that keyword. Your photos should be stored inside the data/images directory.

History

This project started out with the intention of creating a simple website. Most of the tools I work with are overkill for a static website and I didn't feel like hand writing and copying HTML code a bunch of times.

I could have learned how to use one of the many available static website generating tools, but I felt like the concept itself seemed simple enough that I might as well do it myself.

Eventually, I forgot what I wanted to create a website for in the first place, so the project started leaning towards becoming more of a photo gallery generator out of necessity. It is what it is.