emin — a simple builder of static Web galleries

emin makes static Web pages for presenting imagey things — photos, PDFs, graphs with thumbnails — with browsable thumbnails, previews, and links to the image/doc file proper.

emin is primarily intended for making Web photo galleries for the sorts of people who don't want to install some PHP+MySQL+Node.js monstrosity just to put their photos online. On the assumption that many people will want to tweak their gallery's appearance, the output is customisable using the Cheetah templating engine. The only dependencies are Cheetah and the Python imaging library.

Supported image formats are JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, PDF and EPS, with the latter three being converted to PNG for Web display. Image resizing, renaming and thumbnailing is supported, as is building a zip file to download the whole set. Large image sets can be split over several pages.

Usage

emin is extremely easy to use. If you have a directory imgs/ full of images, PDFs, or similar, just run

emin imgs/

and a new directory gallery/ will be created, containing the HTML gallery. You can view this locally with a web browser, e.g. firefox gallery/index.html, or upload it to a webserver and view there (usually without needing the index.html bit of the URL).

The output directory name can be changed with the -o flag, e.g.

emin imgs/ -o mywebdir/mygallery/

A full list of configuration options can be found by running emin -h. For example, to show all the images recursively found in the dir1/ directory tree and all the JPG files in dir2/ on a singl page, with a custom title and output location:

emin -r dir1/ dir2/*.jpg -z -1 -t "My special gallery" -o my/website/gallery/

Changes

• 1.0.0, Aug 2026: change output dir spec to a -o flag, mark as stable.
• 0.7.0, Aug 2026: gallery building from multiple files and (recursed) dirs.
• 0.6.0, Aug 2026: template and JS from local pkg data, split CSS, add --cdn.
• 0.5.0, Aug 2026: update templating to CT3 due to PyPI issues.
• 0.4.0, Aug 2026: update to new TOML-based Python packaging and Py3.
• 0.3.4, Apr 2013: add one-page and --exclude options.
• 0.3.3, May 2011: declare new Cheetah and PIL dependencies.
• 0.3.2, May 2011: first noted version, after several since 2008.