The project consist of a web-based,full featured - but still (fucking) simple - standalone photo gallery software.
I've made intensive research and testing on the current open-source offer. Every photo gallery software around around have serious drawbacks, at least to me. Without naming those projects, here are where they fail:
- SQL backend !? Again ? 😡
- 😞 Ugly and old looking
- Not responsive 😡
- Not maintained 😒
- Gallery management and settings are too complex 😫
- Buggy "upload" feature 😑
For "the best" to happen I have thought of some basic guidelines and wishes:
- Open source
- No database
- It should be simple and intuitive to install and operate
- It has to look simple and beautiful at the same time. (=minimalist)
- We wont reinvent the wheel : it means we'll try to reuse existing components if it exists and fit the need
- Responsiveness
- Albums and sub-albums (or collections)
- Albums password protection
- Takes a photo directory tree as source.
- EXIF metadata support, and by that I mean full support
In my mind, we should start from the root of the subject : showing pictures. So we need an elegant, structured and light way to display photos galleries. I've just started to write a simple example based on Gallery Femto's plugin (see components below). Well, it looks like Flickr or Google+ this:
The common inspiration is https://medium.com/@jtreitz/the-algorithm-for-a-perfectly-balanced-photo-gallery-914c94a5d8af#.f51xvq11g. From there I found the following:
- https://sitemarina.github.io/guggenheim/ - is a gallery plugin for Kirby CMS. Looks beautiful but isn't open-source.
- it is inspired from http://www.chromatic.io/ - This is pretty much how I want the images to appear
- literature @ medium about how the chromatic gallery was made, very useful
- Another implementation of the linear gallery, still inspired by chromatic
- femto CMS gallery plugin uses the linear algorithm.
- foliopages is a good one but unfortunately miss most of the must-have features listed above, and the another good reason to start sharp gallery.
- jQuery Mosaic plugin seems perfect to start sharp gallery photo display.