mindpersephone/picture_browser

Local picture browser

Picture browser

A local picture viewer, runs a web browser that shows a page with all the images and video.

Images will be resized, client side, so they are not taller or wider than the viewing area.

Works well enough for me currently

Running

To display all the images in a folder, pass the path to the folder.

cargo run -- path/to/image/folder

This will cause the system default web browser to open displaying a page with all the images in the folder. They will be ordered in the way that the file system has the images ordered. Known as Inode ordering. This may not be the same as they appear in your folder view.

If you want to specify the ordering you can by passing one of --randomise --date or --alphabetical

cargo run -- --randomise path/to/image/folder

If you want to filter to only have particular kinds of files displayed the --filter parameter takes video images gif or none with none being no filtering. The others will display only the kind of files you selected. Note gif files are included in images

cargo run -- --filter gif path/to/image/folder

By default the server part will time out and shutdown automatically after 10 seconds. This may not be long enough if you have a lot of images. You can set how long the system waits with --delay

If you have video files it is recommended to use --delay 0 which will prevent the automatic shutdown from happening. Most web browsers do not load the full video file when the page loads, only the first second or so, which means another request will happen when or if you eventually press the play button.

Note: This will only bind to local host. This can not and should not be used to host images publicly. Yes you probably could use a proxy or something, but you're on your own. That is not what this was designed for. Don't.

cargo run -- --delay 0 path/to/image/folder

The background colour of the page defaults to the css colour "hotpink" This can be changed with the --background or -b parameter. Any css compatible colour can be used here. black, #FFFFFF , etc

If something is already using the port 6700 you may need to change the default, that can be done by passing in the --port or -p parameter with a valid port value. Note values under 1024 may need admin privileges, pick something between 1025 and 65535. It is beyond the scope of this readme to explain why.

Allowed file types

This does some crude but usually effective file extension matching to decide what files to show in the result. They are "mp4", "webm", "jpg", "jpeg", "png", "gif", "webp" this currently covers all the things I need, if you need other file types please feel free to add a pull request. The constants containing these are called ALLOWED_IMG_EXTENSIONS and ALLOWED_VID_EXTENSIONS. Due to the way html renders videos and images we need to be able to tell the two apart.

Development

Mostly a normal rust project, cargo build etc, however be careful when editing the index.html template. Sometimes editors like to reformat the template fields that use the {{value}} markers also being used as blocks css and javascript. This can cause problems around the background colour. Note that in vs code pressing ctrl+k then ctrl+shift+s will save without triggering the formatter.

Design requirements

• Must not load external files at runtime. No loading external javascript, fonts, css, etc.
  • We don't care what pictures users are display, we don't need to know if its their porn collection or their holiday snaps.
• Must be fast enough
• Must work on most systems.
• Prefer not to commit code crimes.

TODO:

• Verbose flag to enable logging (chatty by default at the moment)

Maybe one day:

• Infinite scroll mode for larger image sets. (Note: disable shutdown timeout when implementing this)
• Install function to add a magic entry to the windows registry to enable on right click menu like vs code or other tools
• Add task bar icons when running in windows like that.