Thumbsup generates HTML galleries for existing photos and videos.

What it does

• Thumbsup groups photos into albums, based on criteria you define (e.g. per folder).
• It creates HTML pages for every album.
• It generates thumbnails & multiple resolutions for internet-friendly browsing.
• It only rebuilds thumbnails if the source files have changed: it’s fast!
• It generates a fully self-contained website, which can be copied onto a USB stick or deployed on a static web server.

What it doesn’t do

• Thumbsup never changes your input folder. In fact, it doesn’t need write access at all.
• It’s not a full application / web server, and doesn’t have “server side” logic.
• It doesn’t have the concept of users, logging-in, etc.

Albums

Albums are a central concept in Thumbsup. Albums are a virtual collection of photos and videos, regardless of where the files are on disk. When generating the gallery you can specify how albums are created, e.g.

• 1 album per folder and sub-folder
• 1 album per date, e.g. YYYY or YYYY/MM

A file can belong to zero, one or many albums.

Performance

Thumbsup uses a few tricks to generate galleries as quickly as possible:

• it caches all metadata into a local database (thumbsup.db) to avoid re-parsing the input files every time
• when reading metadata, it runs several exiftool instances in batch mode to process up to 300 photos/sec
• it check file modification dates to only build thumbnails when necessary
• it runs thumbnail generation in parallel to make use of all CPUs

Standing on the shoulder…

There is no need to re-invent the wheel when dealing with photo and video-processing. Thumbsup uses well known tools under the hood, like exiftool, graphicsmagick and ffmpeg. These tools each have more than 13 years of development and troubleshooting, and provide all the capabilities we need.

Fun fact: ImageMagick will soon be 30 years old!