A gallery for Pelican
Wed 02 April 2025
I am extending Pelican to use the fields gallery: and gallery-dest: in the meta fields. gallery will point to a location where photos or images are located. The intent is that during website generation, that the pelican script will examine the files in that directory for images. Check their EXIF data for a 5-star rating. Pictures are then resized to a web appropriate size; (480x640 or 640x480) depending on orientation. The resized images are copied to the gallery-dest folder (with file root being the output/photos root of the website).
The modified code will be in the Pelican utils.py code. Also, the contents.py and generators.py code will be modified. The first to detect the new field keywords gallery: and gallery-dest: The generators code will note a file has those fields and call the appropriate utilities in util.py.
The contents.py does the check for gallery in the metadata and saves the values when reading in the Markdown file. TBD, maybe this should check for validity? This would avoid later figuring out if the gallery contains photos (or any files). Maybe just ignore the field if the folder doesn't exist or doesn't contain files?
genators.py: in generate_articles() test for gallery metadata and invoke the gallery_copy() located in utils.py. If the gallery-dest is undefined then default to the root level /photos location
utils.py is the workhorse. Adding dependencies for glob, exiftool (ExifToolHelper) and PIL (for Image and ExifTags). TBD, probably need a fall back if the modules aren't installed.
gallery_copy() a utility function to walk the gallery folder of images (Jpg for now) and read their exif Rating. For 5 star images, convert them to web size and publish to the output/ gallery-dest location
convert(). Utility function that uses exif to determine orientation and resize the image
TBD if dest already has an image, could skip the convert. Regeneratation would then to clean the output directory before 'make html'
TBD: posixize path for those Windows users
Note this only 'makes' the images from a gallery available to the pelican website. Markdown files would still have create links to the images via the  or use an alterate markdown extension like !{Gallery
TBD: maybe during the conversion process could 'standardize' the Title EXIF data. This would examine the multiple possible locations in EXIF for the meta data to Title or Id the image and put it in one good location to make downstream processing simpler?
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Pelican Static Website