1 MeAndMyGall Introduction

MeAndMyGall which stands for "Me and My Gallery" is an easy to use web gallery creator. It can read in various graphics formats. You can choose colors and style as lots of other options.

MeAndMyGall is the ideal application to create a gallery or CD-Rom with pictures for your family or friends or to quickly set up a internet site with photo's of your hollidays.

And above all..., MeAndMyGall is freeware!

1.1 Quick Start

This chapter describes how to quickly generate a gallery.

1.1.1 Creating a basic gallery

Creating a gallery is simple. Select the "Input Dir" 1by pressing the browse button and go to the directory with your photo's (MeAndMyGall will not search subdirectories).

Now decide where you want to place your output. Enter "C:\Temp\Gall" in the "Local Dir"1 field or any other directory.

Click the "Create"1 button.

If you don't see any monkeys popping up, some files should have been created in the output dir. Click the "View ..."2 button to view those local files.

1.1.2 Customize your gallery

Select a border style "ridge" in the main column1 (the picture shows "none")

Enter a border size of "9" in the main column2

Select a border color by clicking the main border color button3

Select a background color by clicking the main background color button4

Leave the foreground color, i.e. text color, black.

To not turn your page into total chaos. Press the:

  • "border style"5
  • "border size"6
  • "border color"7
  • "background color"8

buttons. This will make every style the same as the one on the main page.

Again click the "Create" button followed by the "View ..." button.

You should see a page with the specified border style and size.

1.1.3 Uploading to your ISP

Fill in the details in the fields starting with FTP. This information should be available from your ISP or network admin.

Again press "Create". In Addition to the previous steps the files will be uploaded to your website.

1.2 MeAndMyGall Interface

In this chapter I will discuss all options that MeAndMyGall has to offer. When you start MeAndMyGall you will see that the, MeAndMyGall, interface consists of five parts.

In the next chapters I will discuss every part of it.

1.2.1 Input Section

With the browse button you can select an input directory, MeAndMyGall will scan this directory for any known graphic file types and adds them to an internal list of files that should be converted. In addition to this it will look for a file "MeAndMyGall.txt". This latter file is a special formatted text file that can be created using MeAndMyGall or with any regular text editor like notepad.

MeAndMyGall will create a small preview page (with icons) and one or more pages that contain the images themselves. With the icon width/height and image height/width you can specify how large the images on the preview page and zoomed view will be.

The "Type" drop down box allows you to choose the generated type of icons and images. If you don't know what to choose "jpg" is a safe bet.

If the specified height/width ratio of your images and/or icons is not the same as the ratio of the real icons/images, MeAndMyGall can do one of two things:

  • Make it exactly the specified height and width i.e. deform it.
  • Create an optimal solution which isn't exactly equal to the specified width/height. This is the recommended choice.

1.2.2 Progress

This part gives you feedback on what MeAndMyGall is doing when creating your gallery.

1.2.3 Personalize

Of course you want to give your gallery a personal touch. Therefore you can set colors, frames and a page title in this section. You really should experiment a little with it to get some nice results and see what affect a certain setting has on the layout. Note that there are some settings that won't affect the layout, I just included those for people who would like to edit the templates (see advanced usage).

As you can see there are five main sections:

Main
This affects the preview window.
Icon
This affects the icon in the preview window
Frame
When a user zooms in on a windows a frame or new page pops up. This affects the main frame around that area.
View
This affects the image in the zoomed frame.
Info
This affects the info field in the zoomed frame.

In addition there are five styles you can change for those main sections:

Border Style
The kind of border around the area.
Border Size
Specify a width or tiny border in pixels.
Border color.
Select a color for the border of the various areas.
Background Color.
This is the color of the background for the different parts.
Foreground Color.
What color should the text be.

As you might have noticed, the styles are actually buttons. To aid you in creating a neat design those buttons, when pressed, will make all settings in a row the same as the setting in the first column.

Designer tip: Select some nice colors and borders in the first column and then click the five buttons. This will often make your page look better by limiting styles and colors.

Of course you want to give your personal page a nice name like "Our sunny vacation in Greece" or something. You can do this by settig the page title in the edit box,

MeAndMyGall will create an array of preview icons. You can specify how many columns there should be in that array. 8 or 16 is probably a good choice.

1.2.4 Output section

In the output section you have to specify the output directory. The rest of the fields are optional.

If you want to add a copyright notice to your pictures you can use the "Overlay Image" and "Mask Image" field. These field should contain the location of a picture. The overlay image is just what is says it will appear before the actual image in the zoomed view. You might wonder how one could see your great pictures if there was a picture with a copyright notice before it? Well you can't of course but that is where the mask image is for. The mask image will make the overlay image more or less transparent. This works as follows:

The mask image will be converted to a grayscale image. Where the mask image is white the overlay image will be completely opaque. Where the mask image is black the overlay image will be completely transparent. Where the converted mask image is some gray value the overlay image will be more or less transparent.

If you only fill in an overlay image the program silently will use the overlay image as mask and as overlay. This will result in the following behaviour: Everything that is white will appear on the zoomed in view. Everything that is black will not be visible. Any shade of gray will be partially visible.

MeAndMyGall is capable of transferring the generated files to a remote site (likely your ISP and/or your web server).

FTP Server
The name (for instance "www.server.com") or ipaddress (for instance 192.168.1.20 ) of the server you want the web pages on. Update (2015): Since MeAndMyGall is written quite some years back it doesn't support ipv6 (if you don't know what it is an address with 8 fields instead of 4 and colons instead of dots. Also if your web address resolves to only an ipv6 addrress it probably won't work).
User
Your user name on that server. Often but certainly not always this is the name in "http://www.server.com/~name"
Password
The password that goes with the previous user. WARNING: this password will be stored as plain text in the registry. So clear it on exit if you want to prevent other users, of your PC, seeing it.
FTP Dir
The directory where the files should be placed. Often "." or "WWW" or "public_html"

1.2.5 Buttons

The create button will create the webpages for you and is probably the most used button in the program.

To view your locally save pages (those in the output directory) press the view button. This will start the application associated with html files. (Normally microsoft internet explorer ( Edge ), Chrome, Firefox or Opera).

With the "Add info" button you can add text to your pictures. These will appear as text in the zoomed view and as tooltips for the icons.

The text will be saved as a file "MeAndMyGall.txt" in the input directory. This means you should have read/write rights in the input directory. The next time you start MeAndMyGall and use that same directory the info will be automatically added to the pictures.

1.3 Creating an autostart CD-Rom

You might have noticed, that when installing some software from a CD-Rom, the setup program automatically starts. MeAndMyGall creates files for such a CD-Rom. Great to send your pictures to a relative.

The local directory, you specified in the output box, contains, after pressing "Create", all the files necessary to create such a CD-Rom. The only thing you have to do is go into the local output directory. Press Ctrl-A (hold control key and press 'A' which means "select all" in windows). Press Ctrl-C (copy) and go to your CD-Rom and press Ctrl-V (paste). If everything is all right, the root of your CD-Rom directory should contain a few folders, the autorun.exe and autorun.inf file. Note these latter files should be in the root not in a subdirectory.

Now use whatever is appropriate to write these files to CD on your system. In XP you can select "Write these files to CD-Rom". Of course insert an empty CD-R or CD-RW into your drive.

When someone inserts the CD-Rom in a CD-Rom drive and notification is on the application associated with "html" files will start. Typically this is the web browser.

Copyright © 2004 by Ron AF Greve http://informationsuperhighway.eu+31878753207