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Building Image Galleries with Konqueror By Hal Stanton

Building Image Galleries with Konqueror

There are many photo gallery programs but they always seem inconvenient. They aren't included with most Linux distributions, they require complicated setup or they require a lot of command-line work to get the gallery done. Today, I was looking in the menus of Konqueror, KDE's File and Web browser, and saw an entry in the Tools menu called Create Image Gallery. One of the reasons I probably missed it earlier is that it only appears in the Tools menu if you start Konqueror from the "House" icon.

In order to see what this magic tool might do, I created a new directory and copied some pictures to it. You can do this however you want. Working totally within Konqueror you can use New Directory item in the Edit menu and then drag the desired files to the directory. This is usually easiest if you open two Konqueror windows. If you are a command-line user, mkdir and cp can be used to do the same thing.

Once you have all the pictures you want in the directory, click on Create Image Gallery in the Tools menu. You will see a box of options to set the style of your gallery. There are options for images per line, fint, colors and what information is to be included. You can specify a page title and, by clicking the Directories you can specify the output file name (defaults to images.html), whether to recurse any subdirectories, if the files are to be copied and if a comment file is to be used.

I liked the idea of the comment file but found no documentation on it. Nothing on my system and a web search found nothing too. I could use some help here. Does anyone know how to use this feature?

[Note: I went to the KDE.org site and found out how to do this. You create a text file with the name you're going to use in the "Comments File" field. Each thumbnail will have the comment underneath the file name:

FILE1:
comment1

FILE2:
comment2

FILE3:
comment3

The order of the filenames is not important, but make sure you spell them correctly. The comment can be any length, the page will just have that line stretched down to fit it. Each time you change the file you will have to re-run the "Create Image Gallery" command, remembering to check the "Use Comment File" box which appears when you click on the "Directories" icon. -Willy Smith, editor]

Once you have selected the options you want, just click on Ok and your gallery will be created and displayed. It is as easy as that. If you aren't happy with the results, just modify the options and click OK again.

Hal Stanton was a Windows user for too many years. Now he can honestly say that Linux is a lot more fun.

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