What Is PicturePager?
Why Is PicturePager?
Requirements
Using PicturePager
PicturePager Gallery Indexes
PicturePager Templates
Exif and IPTC support

PicturePager
Image Thumbnailer/Gallery Builder

What Is PicturePager?

PicturePager is a thumbnailer/gallery builder for image files. In English, this means it helps turn a bunch of JPEG files from your digital camera into an easy-to-navigate web page.

Screenshot of PicturePager v1 running on Java 1.4 P8 under Apple OSX.

Why Is PicturePager?

Yes, other thumbnailers exist. And they all annoyed me. I couldn't see paying $35, the average price, for such a simple product... especially since every one of the products I looked at lacked at least one of the following features:

Ability to rotate images without modifying the original
Ability to comment individual images
Ability to comment the entire album
Easy-to-build custom templates
Convenient re-sorting of the order the images are included in
Resizing of the large images
Ability to use the EXIF file information in the labels

The first beta releases of PicturePager had all but EXIF support, but the entire initial feature list is there now. New features in Version 1.0 include:

Previous and Next button support at the full-size image html level
IPTC support (because that's where it turns out many of the comments are)

New features in V2 Beta 1 are:

Text-only buttons in supported templates, allows blocks of text without pictures be included in a gallery
EXIF button to add EXIF information to description on a per-photo basis
Button button, for adding a button linking to another web site (for example, another gallery or the web site of the topic of the photo) to the description field of a photo
More powerful templates that can set and limit column and width options
Frame support in templates
Template Chooser, with graphic previews of what a template looks like and with text template descriptions
Ability to choose no, limited, or full text descriptions with thumbnails (full text is always on HTML zoom page, if generated.)
FTP upload wizard, to facilitate gallery publishing to pre-prepared web sites

Page 2 of a 3 page sequence (10 photos) generated in 2x2 mode with the JSButtons template by PicturePager. The user can click on a thumbnail to go to a larger image.

PicturePager is open-source and 100% Java. The top screen shot is under an Apple Macintosh running OSX with the Aqua (native) look-and-feel, while most of the other shots are on systems running Microsoft Windows. PicturePager has been designed and written to be cross-platform.

Requirements

PicturePager requires Java Version 1.4. That's it. This is a fairly recent version of Java, so you may need to nip over to Sun to download the latest. The Apple Macintosh OSX version is still in pre-release form, but PicturePager has been tested and found to work with Java 1.4.1 P8 under OSX.

Java does not provide sufficient memory by default for many operations; the default heap is 32MB, which sounds like a lot until you remember that...

Java does not free up memory the instant the object is no longer needed, instead waiting for garbage collection
Digital Photo files are often 4MB each, and we're doing several operations (often three rotates and scales per) to them, and
Every object comes out of the heap

Consequently PicturePager should be executed with the command line:

java -Xms100m -Xmx256m -jar PicturePager

to ensure sufficient memory.

Using PicturePager

PicturePager has been designed to be incredibly easy to use. There are only two screens you will typically deal with. It has some very strong power, matched with a degree of complexity under the hood and availible to the power-user, but the normal user will never need anything more than these two graphical screens.

The PicturePager file selection/configuration tab under Windows 2000.

This is the Image Files tab; it is used to select files via the Browse... button, remove or change the order of the files, rotate, and comment files

The order that files appear in the list is significant; that is the order in which they will be output to the web pages. Hence the four buttons for reordering or moving around the files.

Button/ Control	Purpose
Browse	Pops up a File Open dialog (a "chooser") to allow selection of image files to add to the list.
by Name	Sorts the files by filename (including directory.) Clicked a second time, it reverses the order
by Date	Sorts the files by file timestamp. (This will eventually read the EXIF header, if any, for the image datestamp inside.) Clicked a second time, it reverses the order
Move Up/Down	Moves the highlighted file up or down in the list.
Remove	Delete this image or record from the list.
Text	Insert a text-only block (no photo). The result is a blank photo, but a description field. The text is put into the thumbnail description by itself; no image zoom page is generated for it.
Add Button	Creates button-code for a description. The result is HTML for URL, embedded in the text, but rendered into a navigation button by the web browsers.
Exif/IPTC	Inserts the EXIF or IPTC description information for this photo only into this description only
Rotate:	Select the amount to rotate the image by. The preview pane will immediately reflect the rotation. This is especially useful for when the camera was turned sideways to allow for taller shots, or when a multi-image photo was merged but not rotated by the camera.
Description	Commentary for this image. The commentary or description will appear in the gallery associated with this photo.

The PicturePager file selection/configuration tab under Windows 2000.

Control	Purpose
Prefix/Suffix radio buttons	Choose whether the text in the box following is a prefix or a suffix. This text is required; it is used to distinguish the thumbnail from the larger image.
Max Sizes	The largest the image is allowed to be. If it exceeds this size, it will be resized proportionally. (Keep Aspect has no impact.) Thumbnails must be under 400x400, large images may be any size, but the size of a screen (say, 800x600) is suggested.
Destination Directory	Where the resulting files are dumped. Typically there will be a lot of files; depending on the settings, there may be more than three files per image. So you should dump them into a new directory.
Destination Filename	What the entry HTML page is called. Subsequent top-level HTML pages use the same name with an incremented index.
Template For Layout	The filename of the template to use for building the web pages. See the Templates page for more on this.
Rows Down/Columns Across	How many thumbnails per Gallery (top-level) page? A maximum columns of three is reasonable, two is often even better, but some templates such as LongDescriptions.pp are designed for a single column. You can generally put as many rows on a page as you'd like... but because any images that don't fit onto the first page will have an additional page generated for them, you may want to keep the pages short enough to be friendly.
Build HTML	When selected, each thumbnail links to a web page with the larger image, the album description, the image description, and an up button. When deselected, thumbnails link directly to the larger image; no text, no buttons. Users then must use their back buttons to return.
Album Title/Description	These appear in the title and album description portions of the output page, which is controlled by the templates.
Save	Writes the settings to the PicturePager.xml file. Build does this automatically.

Who Wrote PicturePager

PicturePager is the work of Tony McNamara, who you can reach at . It's a brief labor-of-love after the annoyances mentioned at the top of this page.

Files

Version 2 Beta 1 Windows installer (includes Java JAR file, templates, and installer wizard): PicturePagerSetupV2B1.exe. Installer uses Nullsoft's NSIS installation tool.

Windows installer (includes Java JAR file, templates, and installer wizard): PicturePagerSetup.exe. Installer uses Nullsoft's NSIS installation tool.

Version 2 Beta 1 Java JAR file and tempates: PicturePager_V2B1.zip

Java JAR file and tempates: PicturePager_V1.zip

For source code and other files, go to the Files area of the SourceForge Project.

Download the ZIP file and unzip the contents into an appropriate directory. Run the JAR, telling Java to provide sufficient RAM... for example, java -Xms100m -Xmx256m -jar PicturePager.jar