[Bins] A quick and easy way of creating basic albums

[Adrian Rossiter]

Hi

I have been trying to streamline album creation and management, and
thought I would mention what I am doing in it is of interest.

I build a dirctory tree of image albums as normal, but in each album
directory I create an include_images.txt file containing a list of the
album images in the order I want them. I get bins to only consider
the images in the include_images.txt files by setting the excludeFiles
parameter in binsrc to exclude all files (.*).

I then add comment lines to the include_images.txt files which I
process with a basic Perl script (below) to set up the album. At the
beginning I add the album details, then after each image I add the
title and description. The Perl script simply calls the bins_edit
program with the various details as arguments.

This is working out reasonably well as I can easily change the
album, image text, order of images, etc just by editing one
text file.

I've included the script below (with some minimal instructions!)

Adrian.
-- 
Adrian Rossiter
Email:     adrian_r at teleline.es
Web Site:  http://www.terra.es/personal/adrian_r



Here is an example include_images.txt file for a one image album -


   #Some Album Title (1 line)
   #Long description of Some Album
   #(can be many
   #lines)
   #|Short description of Some Album (starts after the pipe symbol)
   #can be many lines, then put another pipe symbol and this is followed
   #by the sample album image)
   #|some_image.gif

   some_image.gif
   #Some Image Title (1 line)
   #Description of Some Image
   #can be many lines
   #and include html <BR>
   #but you may have to escape certain symbols for the command line e.g.
   #<A HREF=\"http://www.somesite.com\">Some Site</A>



I call the script bins_addtext. It just takes a list of directories
where it looks for include_images.txt and processes it. You can
use a different file by passing the name with the -f option. e.g

Process include_images.txt in the current directory -

   bin_addtext ./

Process album_desc.txt in directories some_album1 and some_album2

   bin_addtext -f album_desc.txt some_album1 some_album2


#!/usr/bin/perl -w

sub process_file {
   my ($dir, $file, $title, $desc) = @_;
   chomp $desc;
   #print "File: $file\n\tTitle: $title\n\tDesc: $desc\n";
   #print "\n$file\n";
   if($file eq "album") {
      ($longdesc, $shortdesc, $sample) = split /\|/, $desc;
      if($sample) {
         $cmd_str = "bins_edit -a -m --sample \"$sample\" $dir";
         print "$cmd_str\n";
         `$cmd_str`;
      }
      if($shortdesc) {
         $cmd_str = "bins_edit -a -m --shortdesc \"$shortdesc\" $dir";
         print "$cmd_str\n";
         `$cmd_str`;
      }
      if($longdesc) {
         $cmd_str = "bins_edit -a -m --longdesc \"$longdesc\" $dir";
         print "$cmd_str\n";
         `$cmd_str`;
      }
      #print "\t$cmd_str\n";
      $cmd_str = "bins_edit -a -m --title \"$title\" $dir";
      print "$cmd_str\n";
      `$cmd_str`;
   }
   else {
      $cmd_str = "bins_edit -m -t \"$title\" $dir/$file";
      print "$cmd_str\n";
      `$cmd_str`;
      #print "\t$cmd_str\n";
      $cmd_str = "bins_edit -m -d \"$desc\" $dir/$file";
      print "$cmd_str\n";
      `$cmd_str`;
      #print "\t$cmd_str\n\n";
   }
}

$inc_file = "include_images.txt";

for($i=0; $i<=$#ARGV; $i++) {
   $dir = $ARGV[$i];
   if($dir eq "-f" && $i<$#ARGV ) {
      $i++;
      $inc_file=$ARGV[$i];
      next;
   }

   open(FILE, "$dir/$inc_file") or die "Could not open: $dir/$inc_file";

   $title = "";
   $desc = "";
   $img_file = "album";
   $section = 1;

   while(<FILE>)
   {
      chomp;
      $line=$_;
      if(substr($line, 0 , 1) eq "") {
         next;
      }

      if(substr($line, 0 , 1) ne "#") {
         process_file($dir, $img_file, $title, $desc);
         $img_file = $line;
         $title = "";
         $desc = "";
         $section = 1;
      }
      else {
         if ($section == 1) {
            $title = substr($line, 1);
            $section++;
         }
         elsif ($section == 2) {
            $desc .= substr($line, 1)."\n";
         }
      }

   }

   if($section) {
      process_file($dir, $img_file, $title, $desc);
   }

   close(FILE) ;
}