Generate Embeddable Galleries with Weblery

Productivity Sauce

There are quite a few open source solutions for creating standalone photo galleries, but what if you need to embed a handful of photos into a web page or a blog post? Weblery can help you with that. This relatively simple PHP-based software lets you set up a no-frills web-based gallery and embed it into a web page using a single line of code. Better yet, Weblery requires no database back end, so it's easy to deploy and maintain. To run Weblery on your server you need only two things: the Apache web server and PHP4 or PHP5 with the PHP GD extension.

To install Weblery, grab the latest version of the application from the project's website, unpack the downloaded archive, and move the resulting directory to the document root of your web server. Make the assets/album_cache directory writable by the server using the following command:

chown -R www-data:www-data assets/album_cache

To check whether everything works properly, point your browser to http://127.0.0.1/weblery/demo.php (replace 127.0.0.1 with the actual IP address or domain name of your server) and you should see a sample gallery.

Populating Weblery with photos couldn't be easier: just add photos to the albums directory and group them into folders, if necessary. Embedding a Weblery gallery into a web page is not difficult either: simply add the following line in the page where you want the gallery to appear:

<?php require_once('weblery.php'); ?>

In case your server runs PHP4, the embed code should be as follows:

<?php require_once('webleryphp4.php'); ?>

The configuration.php file offers a handful of options for your tweaking pleasure. All options in the file are commented, so you shouldn't have problems figuring what they do. Moreover, Weblery is supplied with a decent manual which can help you to get the most out of this excellent application.