Booh

[ home | example web-album | video demo | tutorial | advanced | discuss | download ]

Booh Tutorials

• The fastest album - demonstrates how to create the fastest album ever
• Starting up - shows how to create a simple web-album with the graphical interface of Booh
• Speed things up! - sheds some light on how to get the job done as fast as possible with Booh
• Password protect parts of your albums - shows how to password-protect selected sub-albums in your albums

Note: you might also want to check out the video demo.

The fastest album (for CLI people)

This tutorial will demonstrate how to create the fastest album ever.

• use the backend program, booh-backend, giving it the top directory of your photos and videos, and a destination directory (empty or non existent!) where to create the album:

  % booh-backend --source /home/gc/photos/foo --destination /home/gc/public_html/foo
  

• ... that's it. This scanned the source directory, and created an album with default parameters in /home/gc/public_html/foo. Now you have no reason to simply drop your photos in a web server directory when you have no time: use booh-backend, it will produce a much better result.

Starting up - part #1: classify photos and videos

This tutorial will show how to create a simple web-album with the graphical interface of Booh, from scratch.

• the first step is to classify your photos and videos; e.g. select the bunch of great photos and videos you want to use for your web-album, out of the vast amount of photos shot the other day (if you only have a limited amount of photos, or if they are already classified, jump directly to part #2); launch booh-classifier, the subprogram of Booh created for classifying Note: this feature is available in Booh >= 0.9.0.

  % booh-classifier /tmp/photos
  

  

• the classifier scans the input directory, and shows a thumbnail for each photo or video found in there (and in any subdirectories); it is optimized to load thumbnails as fast as possible, and will correctly show portrait images based on EXIF orientation tag; you then navigate with the left and right arrow keys or by clicking with the mouse; the aim now is to label the photos and videos according to your removal and/or keeping needs
  • hit the Delete key to label the current photo or video for removal - the thumbnail of the item labelled for removal will be outlined in red, and next photo or video will be selected automatically

  

  • hit any alphabetical key to create a new label, for example hit t then complete by typing tignes to create the label for photos and videos from Tignes

    

    you can then hit t again to label the current photo or video with the (t)ignes label

  

• once all photos and videos have been reviewed, use File/Execute to copy or move photos and videos based on the labels assignments; notice: you need to arrange your photos and videos either in a single directory, or spanned accross multiple sub-directories, following the needs of your web-album, knowing that Booh will create a distinct sub-album for each sub-directory; here's an arranging example:

  

Starting up - part #2: create a simple web-album

• now that your photos and videos are arranged in the directory of your choice, and sub-directories below it, according to your sorting criteria of choice (for each sub-directory, Booh will create a distinct sub-album)...

  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Home
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Home/00002.jpg (...)
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Ski
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Ski/Courchevel
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Ski/Courchevel/img_0866.jpg (...)
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Ski/Tignes
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Ski/Tignes/pict0011.jpg (...)
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Weird
  /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src/Weird/pict0098.jpg (...)
  

  ...you can launch booh:

  % booh
  

  

• open File/New, specify the source directory (in our example: /home/gc/photos/booh-demo-src), a destination directory where the web-album will be created (for example, /tmp/booh-demo-webalbum); you can leave the configuration options to the default for the moment

  

• wait while Booh scans the source directory and create thumbnails necessary to edit your album in the GUI

  

• Booh has created one sub-album for each sub-directory it found in the source directory you specified; they are displayed using a tree on the left part of the main window; on the right part, you can see the images/videos of the currently selected sub-album in the "thumbnails page", while the "sub-albums page" shows one image per sub-album beside the currently selected sub-album, if applicable; now, you can edit captions and more using the GUI; right-click on an image to view the available actions; notice: deleting an image in Booh doesn't delete the original photo/video in the source directory, only in the web-album (unless you explicitely activated that option in Edit/Options)

  

• once finished, use File/Generate web-album, and wait while the HTML album is created

  

• your web-album is ready in the destination directory! just click on the link to view it

  

Speed things up!

This tutorial will shed some light on how to get the job done as fast as possible with Booh.

A big pain when creating web-albums is the step of typing in captions. To not make it worse, the GUI of Booh is dedicated to help you creating captions as FAST as possible, with effective key shortcuts and other niceties.

Captions:

• when a caption text entry gets focus (by mouse or keyboard), current text is automatically selected; this way, if you don't want to keep the current text (99% of situations for default caption containing filename), just begin typing, current text will be deleted (else, hit one of Home/End/Left/Right/Up/Down)
• when you click on an image, focus is automatically given to the caption text entry
• when you hit the Tab key, focus is given to the caption text entry of next image; Shift-Tab goes to previous image; Control-Left/Right/Up/Down goes to caption text entry of image on the left/right/up/down; if the text entry or the thumbnail is not visible, the window is automatically scrolled to make them visible

Others:

• Control-Enter opens a fullscreen view of the image with focus on a button to close it (also triggered by a double mouse click)
• Shift-Left/Right/Up/Down moves current image left/right/up/down (you can also reorder images by mouse drag-and-drop)
• Control-Delete removes current image (this should be Shift-Delete, but this would hurt people used to delete currently selected text that way)
• Alt-Left/Right rotates images clockwise or counter-clockwise
• Mouse gestures on thumbnails:

  	(left mouse button) rotate counter-clockwise
  	(left mouse button) rotate clockwise
  	(left mouse button) remove

• When using the rotate clockwise or rotate counter-clockwise one-click tools, holding Shift or Control inverts the direction

The full list of key shortcuts and mouse gestures is available in the Help menu of Booh.

Password protect parts of your albums

This tutorial will show how to password-protect selected sub-albums in your albums (only works if publishing your web-album on an Apache web-server).

In private web-albums, it's common to have a public part anyone can view, and a private part you'd like to restrict to your family or some of your friends. Booh can use the Apache .htaccess/.htpasswd feature to restrict access of selected sub-albums (some other web-servers offer a compatible feature).

But first, a couple of words about how Apache handles password protection. Password-protecting a directory involves creating a .htaccess file in this directory, containing the path of a password file (typically named .htpasswd); if Apache is suitably configured, it will ask the user to authenticate with a username and a password before sending the page data. Booh will generate the .htaccess file for you, but there is a problem with the path of the .htpasswd file: it must be either absolute (e.g. /home/gc/.htpasswd), or relative to Apache's Document Root; it cannot be specified relatively to the directory to protect; hence, Booh cannot handle it automatically for you. You will have to put the .htpasswd somewhere on the web-server, and give the full path to it in the appropriate dialog of Booh when you active password protection of a sub-album.

• right-click on the sub-album's name you want to password protect

  

• it opens a dialog in which you can choose to password protect the sub-album; activate the proper radio button, and then type in the full path of the password file you will use on the web-server; it's generally adviced to not have it below the directory accessible from the web (typically your ~/public_html, or /var/www)

  

• you can click on generate a password file if you don't already have one; type in the username and password you wish to put in the password file

  

• once validated, a new dialog indicates the filename which was used to create the password file; immediately switch desktop or open an appropriate console/program to copy this file to the web-server (this temporary file will get deleted)

  

  % scp /tmp/htpasswd.4890.0 server:/home/gc/.htpasswd
  

• after validating the main password protection dialog, you will see little icons on the left part of the sub-albums tree; the regular lock icon indicates that the sub-album is password protected; the "unavailable" lock icon indicates that the sub-album is password protected due to a parent sub-album being password protected

  

  note that you will not be able to "test" the password protection if you browse the web-album locally, unless you use a local web-server

Fri May 30 16:58:15 2008