Gallery Generator

A tool for professional photographers to self-host online galleries with full control over templates and styling.

Overview

Gallery Generator is a static site generator specifically designed for creating beautiful online photography galleries. It allows photographers to maintain complete control over their digital presentations while providing flexibility in design and customization.

Features

Core Functionality

• Generate static HTML/CSS/JS galleries from image collections
• Responsive design templates optimized for photography
• Customizable themes and layouts
• Metadata extraction and display (EXIF data, captions, etc.)
• Automatic thumbnail generation
• Video support

Advanced Features

• Search functionality
• Lightbox/galleria viewing experience

Technical Requirements

Stack

• bun package manager and javascript runtime
• Astro backend for generation engine
• React for dynamic frontend components
• Sass for styling
• Markdown for content management

Deployment

• Deployment on various hosting platforms
• CDN compatibility

🚀 Project Structure

Inside of your Astro project, you'll see the following folders and files:

/
├── public/
├── src/
│   └── pages/
│       └── index.astro
└── package.json

Astro looks for .astro or .md files in the src/pages/ directory. Each page is exposed as a route based on its file name.

There's nothing special about src/components/, but that's where we like to put any Astro/React/Vue/Svelte/Preact components.

Any static assets, like images, can be placed in the public/ directory.

🧞 Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project, from a terminal:

Command	Action
bun i	Installs dependencies
bun dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:4321
bun run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
bun preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
bun astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check
bun import medias	Import media from source directory

📁 Media Import Process

The gallery generator uses a media import script to process your photos and generate the gallery content:

# Import media from a specific directory
bun import /path/to/your/photos

# Or set the MEDIA_DIR environment variable
MEDIA_DIR=/path/to/your/photos bun import

The import script will:

1. Scan your media directory for photos and videos
2. Extract EXIF metadata from images
3. Copy optimized versions for a vignette and the full-size image in the local assets/ folder
4. Create markdown files with gallery metadata inside src/content/

👀 Want to learn more?

Feel free to check our documentation or jump into our Discord server.