I brain coded a static image gallery in a few hours

For quite some I wanted to write a small static image gallery so I can share my pictures with friends and family. Of course there are a gazillion tools like this, but, well, sometimes I just want to roll my own.

I took the opportunity during our stay in Schwaz to take a few hours and hack together snig, the (small | static | simple | stupid | ...) image gallery. Here you can see the example gallery (showing some of the pictures I took in Schwaz).

I used the old, well tested technique I call brain coding, where you start with an empty vim buffer and type some code (Perl, HTML, CSS) until you're happy with the result. It helps to think a bit (aka use your brain) during this process.

According to my timetracker I spend 8h 15min (probably half of it spend fiddling with CSS...).

Installation

I used the new Perl class feature, so you'll need at least Perl 5.40 which was released last year and is included in current Debian.

I prefer cpm to install CPAN modules:

cpm install -g Snig

I haven't provided a Containerfile yet, but if somebody is interested, drop me a line.

You can get the raw source code from Source Hut (as I don't want to support the big LLM vacuum machines formerly known as Git(Hub|Lab)).

Example usage

You need a folder filled with images (eg some-pictures) and some place where you can host a folder and a bunch of HTML files.

ls -la some-pictures/ 7156 -rw------- 1 domm domm 7322112 Oct 6 09:14 P1370198.JPG 7188 -rw------- 1 domm domm 7354880 Oct 6 09:14 P1370208.JPG 7204 -rw------- 1 domm domm 7369728 Oct 6 09:14 P1370257.JPG

Then you do

snig.pl --input some-pictures --output /var/web/my-server-net/gallery/2025-10-some-pictures --name "Some nice pictures"

This will:

• find all jpgs in the folder some-pictures
• copy them into the output folder
• generate a thumbnail (for use in the list)
• generate a preview (for use in the detail page)
• generate a HTML overview page
• generate a HTML detail page for each image, linked to the next/prev image
• generate a zip archive of the images
• EXIF rotation hints are used to properly orient the previews
• images are sorted by the EXIF timestamp (per default, you could also use mtime)

ls -la /var/web/my-server-net/gallery/2025-10-some-pictures -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 1370 Sep 26 21:15 20250914_p1370198.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 1370 Sep 26 21:15 20250914_p1370208.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 1370 Sep 26 21:15 20250915_p1370253.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 171738640 Sep 26 21:12 2025-10-some-pictures.zip -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 3977 Sep 26 21:15 index.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 7322112 Sep 26 21:12 orig_20250914_P1370198.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 7354880 Sep 26 21:12 orig_20250914_P1370208.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 7686656 Sep 26 21:12 orig_20250915_P1370253.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 106382 Sep 26 21:12 preview_20250914_P1370198.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 170346 Sep 26 21:12 preview_20250914_P1370208.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 133342 Sep 26 21:12 preview_20250915_P1370253.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 1434 Sep 26 21:15 snig.css -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 5128 Sep 26 21:12 thumbnail_20250914_P1370198.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 9495 Sep 26 21:12 thumbnail_20250914_P1370208.JPG -rw-rw-r-- 1 domm domm 6408 Sep 26 21:12 thumbnail_20250915_P1370253.JPG

You can then take the output folder and rsync it onto a static file server. Or install snig on your web server and do the conversion there..

Again, take a look at the example gallery.

Limitations

For now, snig is very simple and stupid, so quite a few things are still hard coded (like copyright and license). If somebody else wants to use it, I will add some more command line flags and/or a config file. But for now this is not needed, so I did not add it.

Have fun

I had quite some fun hacking snig and also used it as an opportunity to learn the new class syntax (and fresh up on subroutine / method signatures). So not only did I use my brain, I actually learned something new!

Please feel free to give snig a try. Or just use one of the countless other static image gallery generators. Or just write your own!

lobste.rs, hacker news, "reddit": https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1nzls1e/i_brain_coded_a_static_image_gallery_in_a_few/