A free-lance photographer asked us to create a website to display photographs that she sells as postcards, greeting cards, and limited edition prints. Because the photographer is constantly taking new pictures, she asked us to include a simple method that she could use to add and remove images displayed on the website.

Our solution to provide an easy way to update the photographs was an owner-configurable image gallery. This gallery uses uses a simple text file to control the images to be displayed on a webpage.

Below is an example text file - this one controls the Gallery 1 page on the DM Images website.

Each time a visitor views a gallery webpage, a script is automatically invoked. This script uses the information in the text file to generate the webpage that is seen by the visitor.

As shown in the above example, the text file consists of a set of instructions that provide information about the images to be displayed on a gallery page. Each instruction, which is called a tag, consists of a keyword and then additional data, all of which is surrounded by angle brackets.

The details for each image are specified with a photoli tag. (The keyword photoli is short for photo list item.) Two pieces of additional data are provided for each image: the filename of the image and title to be displayed for the image. Both of these items are enclosed by quotation marks.

By editing the text file, the owner can add or delete images displayed on a gallery page on her website without assistance of the website designer. For each image, the owner simply specifies the filename and the title. The images are displayed order in which they appear in the text file.

The images and text files are stored on a cloud storage service. Using such a service greatly simplifies the task of updating both the photos and the text files. The cloud storage service provides PC software that synchronizes their cloud storage with a designated folder on one's PC. The photographer simply updates the photos and text files in that folder and magically, the gallery webpage is automatically updated with her changes.

This owner-configurable image gallery was designed so that all aspects of the gallery can be easily modified for use on other websites.