Album::Tutorial 1.05

Album::Tutorial is a Perl module on how to use the Album program.

SYNOPSIS

This tutorial describes the basic use of the Album program to create and maintain browser based photo albums.

Getting started

To get started, create a new directory and cd to it. Create a subdirectory large and put some pictures there. If you have installed the album tool in your execution path, you can now execute it as follows:

$ album -v
No info.dat, adding images from large
info.dat: Cannot update (does not exist)
Number of entries = 7 (7 added)
mkdir thumbnails
mkdir icons
mkdir css
Creating icons: first-gr.png first.png ... sound.png movie.jpg
Creating style sheets: common.css index.css ... journal.css
im023.jpg: thumbnail OK
im024.jpg: thumbnail OK
im025.jpg: thumbnail OK
im026.jpg: thumbnail OK
im027.jpg: thumbnail OK
im028.jpg: thumbnail OK
im029.jpg: thumbnail OK
Creating pages for 7 images
(Needed to write 7 image pages)
Creating pages for 1 index
(Needed to write 1 index page)

Your results will vary, but be similar to this example run. What you can see is that album found 7 images in the large directory, created thumbnails, icons and css directories, created thumbnails by resizing the images, and finally created the HTML pages. You can inspect your first photo album by opening file index.html with your favorite browser. You can click on any image to see the larger version. Navigation buttons are provided to the left of the image.

It is interesting to run album again:

$ album -v
No info.dat, adding images from large
info.dat: Cannot update (does not exist)
Number of entries = 7 (7 added)
.......[7]
Creating pages for 7 images
(No image pages needed updating)
Creating pages for 1 index
(No index pages needed updating)

album tries to avoid doing unnecessary work as much as possible. In this case, all thumbnails and image and index pages are up to date. The line of periods shows progress, one period for each image processed.