Booh

[ home | example web-album | video demo | tutorial | advanced | discuss | download ]

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 :)

Sat Nov 2 21:32:36 2013