If you've ever visited my site's gallery section, you'll notice it's using some kind of script to build the pages in each exhibit. It's something I wrote a long time ago that's gradually evolved from Perl to PHP, and from text files to XML data files.

Layout-wise, it's not all that modern, still using tables rather than CSS. I still like tables for centred vertical alignment. But some not-too-difficult modifications could change that. The actual HTML I used is pretty minimalist, so there's not a whole lot to change.

There's no "admin" interface to speak of. You edit XML files in a text editor, upload files by FTP, the script merely lets you browse the images using some HTML templates. It's just meant to cut out redundant work.

Anyway, if anyone thinks it'd be useful, either to use, modify or look at, you can get it here. The download includes the demo gallery shown.

One caveat: because thumbnails are placed vertically, once there are enough to scroll off the bottom of the page, browsing becomes a little inconvenient (see how it's starting to happen with my Parkdale Sketches.)

The vertical centering of the image also gets too stretched. I've solved this so far by limiting the number of items in a gallery, but eventually I might fix it to break the thumbs into more columns.

Any other ideas on how to handle more thumbs? (Besides the obvious paging forward/back 5 or 10 or whatever at a time.) I also don't want to put them in horizontal rows across the top/bottom of the page, because on most monitors, vertical space is at a premium, while you tend to have extra space in the horizontal. I suspect adding more columns at the side of the page is the best option here.