view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

lib/Album/Tutorial.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

package Album::Tutorial;

( $VERSION ) = '$Revision: 1.10 $ ' =~ /\$Revision:\s+([^\s]+)/;

# NOTE: This is a documentation-only module.

use strict;

=pod

=head1 NAME

Album::Tutorial - How to use the Album program

=head1 SYNOPSIS

This tutorial describes the basic use of the Album program to create
and maintain browser based photo albums.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

=head2 Getting started

To get started, create a new directory and cd to it. Create a
subdirectory 'large' and put some pictures there. If you have
installed the 'album' tool in your execution path, you can now execute
it as follows:

  $ album -v
  No info.dat, adding images from large
  info.dat: Cannot update (does not exist)
  Number of entries = 7 (7 added)
  mkdir thumbnails
  mkdir icons
  mkdir css
  Creating icons: first-gr.png first.png ... sound.png movie.jpg
  Creating style sheets: common.css index.css ... journal.css
  im023.jpg: thumbnail OK
  im024.jpg: thumbnail OK
  im025.jpg: thumbnail OK
  im026.jpg: thumbnail OK
  im027.jpg: thumbnail OK
  im028.jpg: thumbnail OK
  im029.jpg: thumbnail OK
  Creating pages for 7 images
  (Needed to write 7 image pages)
  Creating pages for 1 index
  (Needed to write 1 index page)

Your results will vary, but be similar to this example run. What you
can see is that 'album' found 7 images in the 'large' directory,
created thumbnails, icons and css directories, created thumbnails by
resizing the images, and finally created the HTML pages. You can
inspect your first photo album by opening file 'index.html' with your
favorite browser. You can click on any image to see the larger
version. Navigation buttons are provided to the left of the image.

It is interesting to run 'album' again:

  $ album -v
  No info.dat, adding images from large
  info.dat: Cannot update (does not exist)
  Number of entries = 7 (7 added)
  .......[7]
  Creating pages for 7 images
  (No image pages needed updating)
  Creating pages for 1 index
  (No index pages needed updating)

'album' tries to avoid doing unnecessary work as much as possible. In
this case, all thumbnails and image and index pages are up to date.
The line of periods shows progress, one period for each image
processed.

=head2 Protecting your work

'album' not only tries to avoid doing unnecessary work, but it is also
very careful to not destroy your original images, nor any other
changes you may have made.

In general, 'album' will I<never> overwrite or modify:

=over 4

=item *

anything in the import directories (see below);

=item *

any images in the 'large' directory (which is considered 'original work');

=item *

any images in the 'medium' and 'thumbnails' directories (but see
B<--clobber> below);

lib/Album/Tutorial.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

  200405171843310052.jpg: link medium thumbnail OK
  200405171845030053.jpg: copy rotate medium thumbnail OK
  Creating pages for 11 images
  (Needed to write 22 image pages)
  Creating pages for 1 index
  (Needed to write 1 index page)

The file 'dsc00052.jpg' has now been imported as
'200405171843310052.jpg'. 'album' tries to link to the image, if that
is not possible, the image will be coped. File 'dsc00053.jpg' must be
rotated, so it will always be a copy.

If you hover the mouse over the file name in the index page, or over
the title on the image pages, a pop-up will show a selection of
information from the EXIF data.

=head2 Embedding other albums

In the file 'info.dat' you can also enter names of HTML documents to
refer to arbitrary other information you want to include in your
album. You can use this to embed (more precisely: refer to) other
albums. For example:

  20040910/index.html  Pictures of an exhibition

This will store in the album a reference to another album. If at the
given location a file 'icon.jpg' exists, this will be used in the
album as thumbnail image. To generate a sample icon for an album to be
included, run the album program with command line option --icon.

The reference will only be present on the index pages. When following
the 'previous' and 'next' links of image pages, these references will
be skipped.

Note that when you click on an external reference thumbnail, a new
browser window will be opened to show the referenced information.

=head2 Additional notes

The B<--clobber> command line option will force regeneration of all
medium and thumbnail images, and HTML pages. It will not force
re-import of the 'large' images. To completely rebuild everything
save info.dat, remove all the files in the album directory (including
.cache), restore info.dat and re-run the 'album' program.

The digital camera import is designed for cameras that adhere to the
ISO DCF standard. Handling of MPG movies and voice images is probably
specific for my Sony DSC-V1.

When importing images from different camera's, there's an extremely
small chance that the EXIF information would lead to identical file
names. This can only happen if the pictures were taken at the exact
same time (according to the camera's notion of time!), and have the
same internal sequence number.

When parsing C<info.dat>, Album treats anything up to a known file
name extension to be part of the file name. In general, this means
that you can safely enter file names with whitespace and other
uglyness.

Known file name extensions are C<jpg>, C<jpeg>, C<png>, and C<gif> for
images, C<mpg>, C<mpeg>, C<mov>, and C<avi> for movies, and C<html>
and C<htm> for links.

=head1 AUTHOR AND CREDITS

Johan Vromans (jvromans@squirrel.nl) wrote this module.

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER

This program is Copyright 2004 by Squirrel Consultancy. All
rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of either: a) the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at
your option) any later version, or b) the "Artistic License" which
comes with Perl.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See either the
GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details.

=cut

1;

# $Id: Tutorial.pm,v 1.10 2006/10/20 14:47:13 jv Exp $