
Show HN: Photish, a simple multithreaded static photo portfolio generator - hlawson
https://github.com/henrylawson/photish
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hlawson
A demo site is here [https://foinq.com/photish-
montage/index.html](https://foinq.com/photish-montage/index.html)

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hlawson
I created Photish as most of the static website generators I came across and
used were text focused. The tooling, patterns and structure were geared
towards sites with lots of text based content.

Photish is focused on photo based websites. Using a collection of albums in a
folder, some templates defined in the language of your choice and some
(optional) accompanying metadata in a YAML file, Photish will transcode your
images into your desired formats (using ImageMagick) and parse and render the
templates against your photo collection.

Transcoding large photo collections can take time, Photish does it's best to
speed up this process by creating multiple threads to allow ImageMagick
transcodes to run in parallel. It also caches all transcodes to avoid
regeneration as you develop your site locally.

Try it out, let me know what you think! The project is in it's early days but
it is in a working and performant state. Happy to take feature requests and or
pull requests.

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tombrossman
Have you tried Sigal?
[http://sigal.saimon.org/en/latest/](http://sigal.saimon.org/en/latest/)

I use Jekyll for static sites but for photo galleries Sigal is my go-to
solution as it is fast and stable and works very well for generating a static
photo gallery.

Nice work on the demo, too.

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jamessb
Expose looks very impressive, and was posted here 74 days ago:

[https://github.com/Jack000/Expose](https://github.com/Jack000/Expose)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376468)

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hlawson
Expose is great, I came across that too when it was shared here. The author
has created some beautiful themes and the example sites look great.

I was keen to contribute to it (to try add other template engines, caching,
etc.) however it is written in bash and the script is over 900 lines and
doesn't have a test suite yet. Not being too proficient in bash I was a bit
anxious about diving in and contributing.

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Jack000
author here. I wouldn't call myself proficient in bash either :]

I think I'd like for expose to remain a simple(ish) script that you don't have
to think too much about. For something more fully-featured with actual
templating, caching, plugins etc bash is not quite the right tool imo.

I'm glad there are more options in the "photo-oriented SSG" space.

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avitzurel
Command line screenshots isn't really helping for a visual tool. With no
screenshots or an online demo this requires a lot of work to just decide if
it's useful or not.

Also, I haven't looked at the code but the first thing I do when looking at
Ruby projects is look for test/spec directory. Kudos for having it and testing
your library

~~~
hlawson
Completely agree, it is a place holder until I've put together my own site
which I'll ideally demo there. I've spent all my time tweaking and improving
Photish that I haven't had time to start the site that I wanted to create
before I made the tool!

A demo is available running "photish init --example && photish host", the
design is kinda embarrassing though so I wouldn't want people misjudging the
possibilities of what you can create with my poor example site design :)

Thanks for poking around, testing is important to me too. There are also
feature tests with cucumber/aruba in the /features directory.

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jasondecastro
Could we get screenshot examples?

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hlawson
Thanks for the feedback, it is on my to do. However for now, Photish itself is
probably best showcased by running it and checking it out. After it is
installed, an example/demo is provided by running:

photish init --example && photish host

Once I put together a nice template and some example sites I they would better
showcase my HTML/CSS/JavaSCript and design skills rather then what Photish can
do. Theoretically any design could be created using Photish as the templates
and assets are completely up to you. The tool just takes care of the
generation.

