PIMP : PHP Image Preprocessor

PIMP : Perl Gimp Preprocessor

What is it?

PIMP is a GNU/Linux realtime web gallery tool using PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) and Imagemagick.

PIMP is also now a GNU/Linux realtime web gallery tool using Perl and the Gimp.

Author: Dave Gough, 2002

Having set up a directory on a server and placed the index.php file in the directory, it scans this directory for new photographic images (landscape, portrait, or both) with extension '.jpg'. PIMP then resizes them to the configured size (using Imagemagick), compresses them, makes thumbnails, lays up galleries of thumbnails, and creates a gallery menu page in cached HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). If a new photographic image is added to the directory it repeats the process to work the new image into the galleries.

Read the code for more instructions... Download here (the file needs the extension .php to work, currently it is .txt so the .php engine does not run it). The code is released under the General Public License.

News

29 March 2005 Perl/Gimp PIMP is coming along nicely. The web interface now takes all the original values converting them into an XML config file in the image directory; this allows the PIMP web interface to return a swift results page, and call the more time consuming part of the process (transforming the images). Gallery layout and content is now controlled via HTML templates with pimp tags of the form [? pimp type=field data=somevalue ?] making it easy to integrate a gallery into any website. A few weeks until it will rock.

16 March 2005 The PHP version of PIMP is no longer being developed. A new development branch has started to use Mod Perl and the Gimp instead of Imagemagick. This has been found to give vastly superior results. Expect some first revisions soon...

Features

Outputs XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) compliant code (with optional W3C icon)
Optional watermarking of images
Variable JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) compression quality
Add your own styles to the gallery HTML
Continues resizing and creating galleries as images are uploaded, each time the page is visited.

What it does not do

I am not releasing a web image upload script, so I assume you have FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or SSH (Secure Shell) access to the directory. Image uploads are fraught with security issues I would rather not launch on you :)

Currently it is set up for photos with an aspect ratio of 1:1.333333.

Here it is

An example of it's output can be seen here.

Version 0.30 here (it has .txt extension here so you can download it - it needs .php extension in use.)

I use PIMP regularly now to broadcast photographs from events, it's simple but effective. I would like it to do much more than it does, and I will be re-writing it in mod Perl shortly. It is not at release version yet but I put it up here in case anyone find the pre-release version useful. In most cases (where I don't want to continuously upload images, but rather a batch) I run PIMP on my local server, produce the cached HTML, removed the index.php file and all the full sized images, tar up the directory and upload to the server and untar.

Release notes


Copyright (c) 2002 - 2004 Psand Ltd.

     This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
     it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
     the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
     (at your option) any later version.
 
     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
     but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
     MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
     GNU General Public License for more details.

More information is available about the General Public License at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html