This is a small application that takes all the images in a directory and creates a lightbox style AJAX image gallery that is web ready. It reads the metadata in the picture to extract the title, description, keywords and rating. Primarily I wrote this to experiment with some C# 3 features, such as LINQ.
There are no options in the program, its fairly simple, point it at an input directory, an output directory and click Make the gallery! And it does its stuff. Its not overly sophisticated, it doesn’t generate thumbnails, just uses width and height attributes on the img tags. All the necessary support files will be copied across to the output directory. A page called index.html is generated and automatically displayed when complete.
Metadata is collected using the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace. This is part of the Windows Presentation Foundation. When I tested this it worked well on Windows Vista, but when I tested it on a machine running Windows XP SP2, I got a codec not available error when accessing the metadata. I got around this by installing Microsoft Photo Info which is a fantastic utility for XP that incorporates read/write access to image metadata, It has explorer integration, and I highly recommend it if you like adding metadata to your images. It can also be very helpful for those who have upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP.
The code to access the metadata is straightforward:
using(Stream stream = fii.OpenRead()) {
BitmapDecoder decoder = BitmapDecoder.Create(stream, BitmapCreateOptions.None, BitmapCacheOption.Default);
BitmapFrame frame = decoder.Frames[0];
BitmapMetadata metadata = (BitmapMetadata)frame.Metadata;
caption = metadata.Title;
if(metadata.Subject != null) {
caption += " - " + metadata.Subject;
}
I tried to close the stream, hoping that the metadata would be cached, but I suspect it uses Lazy loading because it would throw an error as soon as I accessed the metadata.
LINQ seemed a good idea for filtering the files. There may be a better way but this worked just fine.
string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(directoryToProcess);
var query = from f in files
where (new string[] { ".jpg", ".png", ".gif" , ".jpeg"}).Contains(Path.GetExtension(f).ToLower())
select f;
return query;
The lightbox effect is achieved by using the MooTools JavaScript framework, and another library and example from phatfusion which creates the lightbox. This program just encapsulates the HTML generation, metadata extraction and file copying.
There is a lot of scope for improvement. The class layout is fairly simple. Interfaces could be added, and a plug-in approach to allow for different LightBox or similar effects. As this was more of an experiment than a robust utility I didn’t get too precious about such design considerations. I hope it helps a few people to make a gallery for themselves.
Remember Me
a@href@title, b, em, i, strike, strong, u
© Copyright 2009 Mark Focas newtelligence dasBlog 2.2.8279.16125 | Page rendered at Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:31:23 PM (AUS Eastern Daylight Time, UTC+11:00)
