A Photo Gallery Designed for Scout Groups

While developing my group website I threw together a photo gallery in a way that would allow me or any other leader in the group to keep updating it easily over time. Assisting with the development of other group sites the code has been polished to suit a variety of needs and has turned itself into a proper system.

Any Scout Group using the Group website offer gets immediate access and automatic updates in future. These pages are designed for assisting in the webmaster of one of those sites adding the gallery to their site.

Tips, Features and Frequently Asked Questions
Q  1:Can I set my own Colors and Styles?

In a word: Yes.

While the overall structure of the gallery cannot be changed easily for one group. The colors (of course) and the sizes of things can be altered easily.

The gallery uses cascading stylesheets (or CSS). If you know how to use CSS this will be easy, if not your favourite search engine should be able to help with that.

The default stylesheet can be found Here, just make a copy of it in your gallery folder called gallery.css and change any of the settings you want. I hope I have provided enough comments and description of each style that it is easy to change. If not just ask me

The local stylesheet in your gallery folder will be applied on top of the default settings, so you can easily delete any of the styles that you don't want to bother changing.

Q  2: What Types of Images Can I use in the gallery?

As of this writing a range of Images, Videos, Sounds, and Multimedia files can be displayed.
Below is the current list of accepted file types.

JPEG Image.JPG
JPEG Image.JPEG
GIF Image.GIF
PNG Image.PNG
Quicktime Video.MOV
Windows Media Video.WMV
MPEG Video.MPG
Wave Sound File.WAV
MP3 Sound File.MP3
Flash Media Display.SWF
Matroska Open Multimedia Presentation.MKV

If you have another media file type that you want to display in the gallery let me know what it is.
Being on a public website it needs to be something that others can view before it will be accepted though.

Q  3: Other Groups have activity location and date details. How do I do this?

You can add a special configuration file called meta.dat to the activity folder that describes the gallery or part of it. This only needs to be done for the galleries needing text.

Below is a demo of the content of this file. Note that the , characters are needed.

TITLE   ,  First Camp a linux geek ever went on.
DATE    ,  1st January 1970
LOCATION,  Some Place. I was not there.

As you can see the file has a number of TAGS followed by a comma then the details to be displayed. The demo file above has all the tags available. None of them are required (thus the plain gallery doesn't even have this file).

  • Whitespace around the start and end of the details is ignored
  • Whitespace inside text is shrunk to a single space.
  • The Order of the tags does not matter.
  • Tags may be use multiple times. Only the LAST one is used.

Q  4: Other Groups have text and attributions with the photos. How do I do this?

You can add a file to the gallery folder using exactly (case matters!) the same name as the image you are attaching text to. Only with a type extension of .dat instead of .jpg or .gif etc.

This file contains a number of TAGS similar to the meta.data file described above in Q3. The TAGS available here are:

PHOTO	 , [Photographer-Name]
DETAIL	 , [Description]
WIDTH    , [Width-In-Pixels]
HEIGHT   , [Height-In-Pixels]

There is another way of setting these details, using the gallery meta.dat file described in Q3 and Q5. These per-image files are loaded AFTER the gallery layout, so this file can replace some details in that file if you are not careful.

This file is useful because:

  • You can add multiple DETAIL lines and thus create several paragraphs of text with a single image.
    (All other tag duplicates replace old values).
  • You may not want to fix an images location at the start of the gallery.

Q  5: Other Groups have lots of images on a page, and strange thumbnails. How do I do this?

This uses an extension of the meta.dat file described in Q3 adding more detailed lines that describe the layout of images in the gallery.

These more detailed lines have the format:

PAGE   , [Thumbnail-Filename],[Default-Photographer-Name]
IMAGE  , [Image-Filename], [Width-in-Pixels],[Height-in-Pixels],[Photographer-Name],[Description]

For a real-life Example:

PAGE  ,ollieslide_tn.jpg, Amos Jeffries
IMAGE ,ollieslide.jpg,600,514,,OLLIE<br />...Heading for the mud
IMAGE ,nickjump.jpg,600,514,,NICK<br />... Bombing the pool

The above creates a page with the ollieslide image for the thumbnail but the page itself displays both the ollieslide and nickjump images, with a brief piece of text for each and a photographer name of Amos Jeffries on both.