jekyll-galleries

By allenlsy

Jekyll-galleries is a Jekyll plugin used for generating photo galleries from image folders.

A demo to this plugin is on my personal website.

If you have any questions or any suggestions, I'm very pleased to hear from you. I need your support and ideas to make this plugin better.

• Automatically generate galleries from galleries folder
• Provide a convenient to generate galleries index page
• Load galleries and photos configuration from YAML file

There are two main concept in this plugin:

• GalleriesPage: index page displays all the galleries
• GalleryPage: single gallery webpage which shows all the photos in this gallery

Here is an example on how to use this plugin.

Add gem 'jekyll-galleries' to the Gemfile in your jekyll project, and also the depedencies rmagick. Then run bundle command in shell to install them. Next add require 'jekyll/galleries' to _plugins/_ext.rb.

There are three attributes which are optional. All of them should be put into the _config.yml, if needed.

• galleries specifies the extra information of each gallery, using the YAML object format.
• gallery_dir defines which folder in jekyll project stores the all the galleries. Default value is galleries if not defined.
• gallery_layout defines the layout Jekyll-galleries will use to render each single gallery. Default value is gallery, which uses the _layouts/gallery.html as the template.

Check out the example _config.yml down below if you are still not clear.

By default, galleries are stored in the galleries folder in the jekyll project root path. If you want to change the storing path, you can customize the gallery_dir attribute it in _config.yml file.

Jekyll-galleries will recognize all the subfolders in galleries (or gallery_dir specified in _config.yml) with the format of <yyyy-MM-dd>-<NAME> as a valid gallery folder. Meanwhile it adds date (value yyyy-MM-dd) and name (value NAME) attributes to the gallery. In the name attributes, space and other characters are allowed. All the files in gallery folder will be loaded to the GalleryPage. So please ensure you have correct image file in the gallery folder.

You can have a .yml file with the same name of the gallery folder, to define attributes of each photo in that gallery. Only photos with extra attributes are required in the yaml file. Each photo is identified by the attribute filename. For example, if you have an gallery, whose folder name is 2014-01-23-At the beach, then in a 2014-01-23-At the beach.yml file, you can config photos like this:

- filename: IMG_0075.JPG
  annotation: this is the allenllsy's jekyll-galleries
- filename: IMG_1234.JPG
  annotation: shot at London

Then later you can use the attributes in your template, such as annotation in the example above.

Notice that attribute filename is required for any photos that as extra attributes.

Inside the optional galleries attribute in _config.yml, you can have objects, with attribute name the value equals to your gallery name (not containing the date). For example:

galleries:
  - name: Sample Gallery
    subtitle: This is a sample gallery

Then in the template, the gallery will have the attribute subtitle that can be rendered.

Another attribute is top. If you set top: true for a gallery, then this gallery will always be put on top of the galleries index page. For example:

galleries:
  - name: Sample Gallery
    subtitle: This is a sample gallery
    top: true

thumbnail is a special optional attribute. If you want to add a gallery cover thumbnail to galleries index page, you need to specify the thumbnail file name (not path).

Now, the site.data['galleries'] global variable contains all the gallery pages. It is an array of GalleryPage objects. Each GalleryPage object has at least three attributes: name, date and url. url is URL escaped. You can use them in your galleries index page.

In each gallery page, you have a page object. And page.photos is an array of Photo objects. An Photo object has at least filename and url two attributes. The url attribute is also URL escaped, so you don't need to worry about it.

In the example below, you will see how to use attributes in template in more detail.

• Galleries Index page: the index page of all galleries
• Gallery Page: the page display photos in that gallery

Suppose in the Jekyll project root folder, my file structure is like below:

galleries/
|-2014-01-23-At the beach
| -IMG_0001.JPG
| -IMG_0005.JPG
|-2014-02-01-Chinese New Year
| -sing a song.jpg
| -having dinner.jpg

After installing and setting up the plugin, I add a galleries index file galleries.html in Jekyll root directory:

---
layout: base
---
{% for gallery in site.data['galleries'] %}
  <p>
    <a href="{{ gallery.url }}">{{ gallery.name }}</a>
    <span>{{ gallery.date }}</span>
  </p>
{% endfor %}

If I want to also add other attributes, such as excerpt for some galleries, I can specifies them in _config.yml

galleries:
  - name: At the beach
    excerpt: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.

Then I update the galleries.html page:

---
layout: base
---
{% for gallery in site.data['galleries'] %}
  <div>
    <a href="{{ gallery.url }}">{{ gallery.name }}</a>
    <span>{{ gallery.date }}</span>
    {% if gallery.excerpt %}
    <p>
      {{ gallery.excerpt }}
    </p>
    {% endif %}
  </div>
{% endfor %}

The generated galleries.html should be like this:

<div>
  <a href="/galleries/2014-02-01-chinese-new-year.html">Chinese New Year</a>
  <span>2014-02-01</span>
</div>
<div>
  <a href="/galleries/2014-01-23-at-the-beach.html">At the beach</a>
  <span>2014-01-23</span>
  <p>
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
  </p>
</div>

Next, I add a _layouts/gallery.html file as my gallery template. This is the template for each single gallery

---
layout: base
---

{% for photo in page.photos %}
  <img src="{{ photo.url }}" style="width:800px;"/>
  {% if photo.info %}
  <p>{{ photo.info }}</p>
  {% endif %}
  <hr >
{% endfor %}

In this template, I take use of the extra attribute info of photo. This attribute can be configured in photos config file, eg. galleries/2014-02-01-Chinese New Year:

- filename: 'sing a song.jpg'
  info: 'We are singing a song'

The photos are identified using the filename attribute.

After I run jekyll build, it should generate a file _site/galleries/2014-02-01-chinese-new-year.html. The content should be like:

<img src="/galleries/2014-02-02-Chinese%20New%20Year/IMG_0094.JPG" style="width:800px;"/>
<hr >
<img src="/galleries/2014-02-02-Chinese%20New%20Year/sing%20a%20song.jpg" style="width:800px;"/>
<p>We are singing a song</p>
<hr >

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