Jekyll Art Gallery plugin

An advanced Jekyll plugin for generating art galleries on static/generated sites. Supports image tagging, thumbnails, sorting, image rotation, post-processing (remove EXIF, add watermark), multiple collections and much more. You can see a gallery generated with this plugin on this artist's site

Installing

You need rmagick, exifr, imgemagick and magickwand lib. On Ubuntu run

sudo apt-get install libmagickwand-dev imagemagick
sudo gem install rmagick exifr

Then place art_gallery_index.html, art_gallery_page.html into your site's _layouts/ directory. Place jekyll-art-gallery-generator.rb into the _plugins directory or into jekyll global plugin folder. Add gallery.yaml into the _data folder and edit it appropriatelly.

Use _data/gallery.yml, not _config.xml, for the gallery settings.

Image files should live in the _portfolio/ directory. Specifically, this plugin expects them to be in the following hierarchy: _portfolio/gallery folder/image.jpg.

Note that art_gallery_index.html and art_gallery_page.html are just bare-bones samples and need to be modified to fit your site. They are samples that rely on Foundation CSS and JS.

How it works

The plugin will use copy files from the source folder into the destination folder per your settings in gallery.yaml, and transform them in the destination folder per your settings. The source files will never be changed.

The plugin auto-discovers, enumerates the folders and files, resizes/cleans EXIF if necessary and copies to the generated site directory. It creates the thumbnails and front page images if necessary, saves them into the thumbs subfolders. You could, but do not have to define individual galleries in gallery.yaml.

The plugin then populates Jekyll variables, so they can be used throughout the site. Things like navigation links, thumbnail and names of images picked to represent each gallery on an index page. It then runs the templates through jekyll/liquid engine and creates appropriate index.html pages in each portfolio. The individual portfolio pages are generated from the art_gallery_page.html template in _plugins/. The overall portfolio index is based on art_gallery_index.html.

You can hide individual galleries by specifying the hidden flag in gallery.yaml. You could hide specific files in a gallery by creating a subfolder in a gallery folder and moving the files there (this plugin is not recursive). Alternatively each file folder can be hidden by chaning its name to start with a dot.

Notes

• Gallery names (folders and names in gallery.yaml) are case insensitive and can contain spaces. Note though that in some circuimstances, like using Windows subsystem for Linux to run jekyll, you might have to lowercase folder names.
• An invisible watermark via a Fourier Watermark is better but not implemented. That watermark is visible when viewed with the Fourier filter - for more see gmic.sourceforge.net or G'Mic plugin for Gimp
• Also an EXIF "Copyright" tag can be added (it's somewhere in the middle between the highly visible/annoying current watermark, and the invisible Fourier one)
• The plugin is not yet packaged as a gem, just not time to do it.

Configuration

Look in the gallery.yaml, it should be pretty self explanatory.

• symlink - makes a symbolic link instead of copying files from the original portfolio folder into the generated site folder. Destructive modifications (e.g watermarks, downsizing, EXIF removal) dont work with symlinks.
• images are .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif
• watermark - Transparent image, from images/ folder, with grayscale used for hardlight compositing, in the lower bottom corner.