“If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.”
Brian Kelly (source)
Photog! is written in the Perl programming language and will run on any system that has the Perl interpreter installed. Perl is installed by default on OS X and Linux, but Windows users will have to download and run an installer. You can check if Perl is installed by executing this command in a terminal:
perl -v
(On Windows, the terminal can be found at Accessories > Command Prompt. On OS X, the application is called “Terminal”. After starting the terminal, you can execute commands by typing them and pressing Enter.)
ImageMagick is collection of command-line utilities to manipulate images. Photog! uses it to generate thumbnails and watermarks. It’s easiest to install ImageMagick using your operating system’s package manager, if you have one. On Debian-based operating systems, open a shell prompt and execute the following command:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
On RedHat-based systems, use the following command:
sudo yum install ImageMagick
On OS X using Homebrew, use this command:
brew install imagemagick
Mac users without Homebrew and Windows users should use the ImageMagick installer.
You are now ready for the final installation step: installing Photog! The installation command is the same on Windows, OS X, Linux, and any of the 100 platforms that Perl supports. In your terminal window, execute:
cpan Photography::Website
This command automatically downloads and installs Photog! from the
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). During
the installation process the cpan utility might ask you some
questions. You can safely press Enter to accept the default answers.
Perl has an ecosystem with a heavy emphasis on the testing of
software. The cpan command automatically downloads all the modules
that Photog! depends on, and it runs all the tests that the authors
of those modules have written. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the output
of all the downloading, testing and installing. It might take a while.
When you get your prompt back without error messages, Photog! is
successfully installed on your system. If the installation has failed,
this is probably because one of the tests failed. You can work around
this by instructing cpan to install anyway:
cpan -f -i Photography::Website
A note for Mac and Linux users: If you experience any problems, you
can also try to install as root by prepending sudo to the installation
command.
Now Photog! has been installed, you’re ready to create your first
photography website! Simply cd to your Pictures directory and
execute photog:
cd Pictures
photog
Since this is your first run, Photog! will ask you what the
destination directory should be. Press Enter to accept the default
location. Now Photog! will start generating your website. When it’s
done, look for a file named index.html in the destination directory
and open it in your web browser. Enjoy!
The next step is to learn how you can configure Photog! to do exactly what you want. There are many configuration variables available. You can also customize the templates and the commands used to generate the images. You can even specify a seperate configuration for each subdirectory of your pictures folder. To learn how, head on over to the Documentation.