Booh
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Booh is a free software static Web-Album generator for
Linux. It takes series of photos and videos, and
automatically build static web pages to browse them
- watch the results.
#1: sort your photos
#2: classify them
#3: input captions
#4: album completed!
There are already a lot of web-album generators available for
Linux; Booh differentiates with its unique features set:
- automatic rotation of portrait photos thanks to
information read in .jpg file (EXIF)
- immediate display of images (preloading in browser) - waiting a couple of seconds between
each image is very frustrating
- keep position of "next/previous" hyperlinks in browser
between images
- clever use of the whole space of a typical browser
window (definitely not good to scroll to see the bottom of portrait images -
or, opposedly, using only 1/4 of the screen area for a landscape image
seems a poor use of space)
- themability (see: gradient -
simple -
cardu -
dark -
sbs)
- sub-albums support
- remember end-user preferred size of thumbnails accross sub-albums
- multi-processor support to speed up thumbnails generation
- smooth integration of panoramic images
in thumbnails pages
- full video support, including thumbnailing (with seek time
specification possibility), transcoding and embedded
flash playback with Flowplayer
- multi-languages web-album navigation
(using Apache
MultiViews - navigation links are automatically shown
in user's language)
- a graphical user interface both easy to use for newbies, and very powerful
so that power users can input captions, rotate,
reorder and remove images FAST (extensive use of
keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures)
A subprogram, booh-classifier,
is available to provide powerful and fast classifying of your
tons on photos and videos in order to keep only the best of breed
in your web-albums. Notice that it is not a database
application (an application to assign permanent tags), it's a
tool for batch deleting/copying/moving around images/videos. Main
features:
- FAST loading of photos and videos into thumbnails
(loads about 7 3.0 MB photos per second on a p4 - is believed to
compete
well)
- FAST navigation even while loading photos and videos in background,
preloading of surrounding thumbnails
- keyboard shortcuts for navigation and classifying
Status
Booh is mature. There should be only maintainance releases.
Check the tutorial section for
a short how-to using Booh.
By the way, Booh stands for Best web-album Of the
world, Or your money back, Humerus. The acronym
sucks, however this is a tribute to Dragon Ball by Akira
Toriyama, where the last defeated enemy (beaten in chapter #42:
nothing's random) is named "Boo". But there was already a free
software project called Boo, so this one will be
"Booh".
If you like booh, you can flattr it in the top-left part of the page.
Why static?
Dynamic web-albums have a great momentum, for example
Gallery (on PHP) or Flickr. They are very nice
especially because once set, you just drop an image in a
directory and the next run of the PHP (or ASP or whatever server-side
component used) will add the thumbnail. However, Booh is a static
web-album generator, which means you need to re-run Booh when
you add images, then upload your web-album on the web-server
again; however, there are interesting advantages
over dynamic web-albums:
- using a local native application, authoring the web-album
is much faster (no loading wait) and powerful (more GUI possibilities, mouse gestures)
- uses less bandwidth to send photos (with a modern
digital camera, you will send 2-5 Mbytes for each photo,
with Booh you will send 2 10-30 Kbytes files and 2 100-150
Kbytes files)
- less load on the server (serving static pages versus
serving heavy dynamic pages with costly images resizes)
- gives ability to handle videos too (using mplayer locally
to produce thumbnails is very efficient, and usually not
possible on server-side)
- no need for PHP/ASP or any extension, so easier for
hosting
- being static versus being dynamic with need for write access is more secure
- interesting for those who do not wish to delegate (too much)
the handling of personal data
- compared to Flickr, you don't have to pay to break all the limits they impose on "normal" users :)
Guillaume Cottenceau
Sat Nov 2 21:32:36 2013