Documentation

Getting started

• Introduction
• Requirements
• Installation
• Basic usage

Configuration

• Configuration basics
• Configuring directories
• Configuring thumbnail images
• Configuring preview images
• Setting JPEG compression
• Filtering image types
• Getting XHTML compliant output
• Disabling caching
• Displaying script info and stats
• Multiple galleries on one page
• Disabling auto output

Pagination

• Enabling pagination
• Default pagination configuration
• Number of pagination links
• Pagination URL parameter
• Customizing pagination HTML
• Pagination nav above the gallery

Customizing gallery HTML

• Custom HTML with placeholders
• Placeholders
• Extracting data from file names

Introduction

Dead Simple Gallery is a simple image management system that's focused on speed and simplicity. It can adapt to almost any visual style and works flawlessly with most of the popular lightbox and slider/carousel scripts out there.

# Who it's for

Dead Simple Gallery is for people who want to easily display some images on their website, without the need of manually creating thumbnails and/or previews.

You don't need extensive PHP knowledge to use it, just being able to copy/paste some simple PHP code for configuration (similar to what Javascript plugins use) will be enough.

# What it's For

Dead Simple Gallery is intended as a Content Management System (CMS) for image galleries, sliders, slideshows, carousels or plain image lists. It can serve from something as simple as a content management system (CMS) for a lightbox gallery, to more complex uses like building a whole wallpaper directory site.

# Tech Specs

Dead Simple Gallery is a self hosted, single file PHP application taking advantage of the GD library.

See also

Requirements

# How it works

To better understand how Dead Simple Gallery works, let's compare two processes of building a simple gallery, with and without Dead Simple Gallery.

Common gallery building process (without Dead Simple Gallery):

1. Prepare thumbnail images by cropping or scaling, then exporting optimized files.
2. Scale big preview images for lightbox, then export optimized files.
3. Copy thumbnails to your site folder.
4. Copy previews to your site folder.
5. Write HTML for your gallery, embedding and linking appropriate image files.
6. Repeat points 1-5 for every image in the gallery.
7. Style the gallery.
8. Install a lightbox script.

The same gallery building process with the aid of Dead Simple Gallery:

1. Copy original images to ds_galleries folder in your site directory.
2. Install Dead Simple Gallery by writing 1 line of code.
3. Configure Dead Simple Gallery (optional).
4. Style the gallery.
5. Install a lightbox script.

Dead Simple Gallery does a couple things:

• prepares (scale/crop, optimize) and caches thumbnails
• prepares (scale, optimize) and caches preview images
• writes a list of HTML image tags (thumbnails) wrapped in anchors pointing to big image previews (not the original images - you don't want to drop a 5 MB JPEG on the user's face ;) )
• creates paginated galleries (optional)
• and a couple more tricks…

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