Mason Gallery v1.3
------------------

This is a yet another system for automatically maintaining a gallery of images.
This particular version has the following (not necessarily unique) features:

* It is written for the Mason (http://www.masonhq.com/) embedded Perl web
  system.
* It extensively takes advantage of caching to provide fast loading pages (all
  image size tags are given for the thumbnails), this is important because:
* The thumbnails generated are sized to a uniform width, but allowed to vary 
  in height, generally providing for more viewable images.
* Intermediate JPEGs are rotated and scaled for large/badly rotated images.
* New thumbnails are generated (and deleted) as needed; there is no indexing 
  script to run, just drop the files anywhere under the top of the tree (make
  directories, etc, etc).  The first time the pages are visited, any new 
  directory/image thumbnails will be generated.  In fact, to add an entire
  existing image directory structure to the gallery, just move it anywhere
  under the top level directory, and you're done.
* Detail image information is available courtesy of Image::Info off of the
  individual view pages.
* You can easily add captions to your images and comments to your pages:

To add a page comment, just create a file in the directory called "comments".
This may contain any well-balanced HTML tags you like, but you break it and it
breaks.  Whatever you put in this file will appear near the top of the page.

To add an image or directory caption, create a file in the same directory 
called "captions" which is in the following format:

** name-of-image.jpg
Stuff about the image given on the ** line, however much
you want on any number of lines, including minimal well-balanced
<b>HTML tags</b> like so, until you either reach the end of this
file or the
** next-images.gif
and so on and so forth.  You can even include captions for a
** directory-name
like so.

* If your pictures are photos from a digital camera, they may have EXIF 
  thumbnails embedded.  If you (leave) the thumb_width in the config set to
  160 pixels, then the index pages will be rendered faster the first time,
  as the thumbnail generator will merely extract the existing thumbnails
  (if they exist) rather than creating its own.  If you have the thumbnail
  size set to less than 160, it will still check if they exist, and if so
  use them for generating the smaller ones to save time.

* Finally, if you wish pictures to be rotated for viewing/thumbnailing, just
  set the execute bit for the group to rotate left, and other to rotate right:
  chmod g+x file.jpg   ## will rotate left
  chmod o+x file.jpg   ## will rotate right
* There is a rudimentary DB-backed keyword search new as of 1.1.  It is very 
  crude, requires lots of tweaking, and only works with PostgreSQL.  Read
  INSTALL for details.

For installation instructions, read INSTALL

Enjoy!

--David Bushong
--david+masongallery@bushong.net
