💾 Archived View for gem.billsmugs.com › gemlog › 2021-10-17.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:05:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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In the above linked post, FiXato presents several good ideas about ways to present collections of photos on Gemini capsules. The "Overview of all photos at a glance" section in particular struck me as an excellent point:
One of the main features of a photo album probably is that you can see multiple, if not all, photos in it at the same time. While they usually are thumbnail-sized, you can still get a clear idea of what each picture looks like, and whether or not you’d like to see a larger version of it.
I've now implemented this for my own photo posts. I was going to go with a slightly prettier version of the basic approach he presents (using the ImageMagick 'montage' command), but I found that ImageMagick actually has a built-in option '+polaroid', which presents an image as if it's a Polaroid photo on a surface (including a random rotation and slightly curled paper effect). This reminds me of one of the PS3 photo slideshow styles and makes the preview a bit more fun, while still (hopefully) making it easy to decide if you want to view any of the photos in higher resolution.
Here's an example preview image. The numbers correspond to the links on the photo page.
Here's the page for the above preview.
You can see a bit of the PS3 slideshow I mentioned at the start of this Youtube video.
Unfortunately my employment contract forbids me from sharing any code I write at home. I'd generally be happy sharing very simple bash scripts, but this preview generation script has several variables, branches, and loops so it feels more 'code-like' than I'm comfortable with. It is however a relatively simple modification of the example script in the ImageMagick documentation here:
Two Stage Positioning of Images
I've added previews to all my existing photo posts. Some of the 'folders' have loads of images in, so the preview images are very tall and may not render well in some clients (Lagrange seems to struggle with them), but going forward I expect to usually post only a few photos at a time, so I've stuck to a four column layout (if the first few photos are all tall and thin (and not heavily rotated) there could in theory be five images in a row).
The handwriting font I'm using for the image labels ("Icegirl") can be downloaded here.
