Programming Snapshot – Go Photo Sharing

When I show people some of my freshly captured and beautifully crafted digital photos, they often ask if I can send them a copy. Being the generous giver that I am, I typically hand it over. But if there are several photos that several people are requesting, it's easier to put the whole collection on the web and share a link so that the recipients can help themselves.

This Snapshot column looks at a CGI script, photoup, that lets a privileged user upload one or more photos to a web server. The photos end up in a directory with a random long name that is difficult to guess. The display uses a layout that showcases the photos either in groups or as single views and renders amicably on a desktop or a smartphone. The whole kit and caboodle is implemented in Go. I'll throw in an introduction to Go's template engine, because the layout is made up of individual snippets that the finished program outputs as a complete HTML page. The engine can even dynamically integrate photos using template loops, making it indistinguishable from magic!

For example, to share the photos I took during a recent flight, I uploaded them using my smartphone's browser (Figures 1 and 2). The newly generated link (Figure 3) points to a digital contact sheet (Figure 4). Clicking on an image fetches the full-resolution JPEG file (Figure 5) so that friends can download images to their heart's content.

[...]