www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/my-photo-publishing-approach.mdwn

[[!meta title="My photo publishing approach"]]

During a discussion about image management software like
[gthumb](http://live.gnome.org/gthumb),
[f-spot](http://f-spot.org/) or [shotwell](http://yorba.org/shotwell/),
we came up with the question how far a management software should go.
Should it provide basic image manipulation? Publishing to the web?
Creation of static web albums?

For me the feature "create static webalbum" is very important,
as I don't want to publish my images/photos on sites like
[picasa](http://picasaweb.google.com/) or
[flickr](http://www.flickr.com/), because I don't want to depend
on these companies. I especially do not want to recreate
all the albums, if one of those companies stops providing the service.

One of the main questions is, which program should handle the gallery
creation process:

 * the image viewing / managing utility (most likely with a gui)
 * an external command line utility

After some time, I think there are some key points:

 * a special designed command line utility may be better suited for the job
 * a gui may be very good suited to actually select the right images

## How I create and publish static photo galleries

So in the end, I decided for the following setup:

 * Use shotwell to organise photos
 * Use shotwell to export downscaled version of photos to a directory
 (one per event)
 * Create a Makefile, which utilises llgal to (re-)create the whole website

Thus I can change the gui, but do not need to change the gallery format.
You can find the result at
[photo.nico.schottelius.org](http://photo.nico.schottelius.org).

## SEE ALSO

 * [[docs/static-image-gallery-generator-comparison]]

[[!tag net unix]]