1 Introduction
1.1 What is eSlides?
eSlides is a free lightweight and high-performance command-line tool for generating
web slideshows. It takes a folder of photos as input and automatically generates thumbnails
with optional drop shadows, web-optimized viewing images, a webpage with a dynamic slideshow,
and an optional link to a zip file with all the full-scale images.
It is a Perl script that uses ImageMagick
and can be run on Unix, Mac OSX, or Windows. Because eSlides does not rely on any auxiliary Perl modules,
it can be easily run on any machine with a Perl interpreter and ImageMagick.
Most available slideshow software, like the
Web Album Generator for Windows,
create static slideshows consisting of a collection of webpages, but eSlides harnesses the power of
Javascript and CSS stylesheets to maximize the digital photo sharing experience with images that
dynamically slide across the web browser.
1.2 Why should I use eSlides?
If you own a digital camera, then you've most likely tried to share some of your digitally captured moments
at birthdays, formals, parties, and trips with friends or family. To share the photos,
chances are that you've tried
instant messaging your photos, sending the photos over email, or simply dumping them into a publicly
viewable directory on some web server, and you might have found that all of these methods are quite
inefficient.
Instant messaging the photos requires many rounds of pairwise communication where
both the sender and the receiver are online concurrently and can be slow when there is limited network
bandwidth. Sending the photos via email does not scale well to a large
number of images and can easily consume excessive mail storage space or cause email clients to
freeze while downloading multi-megabyte attachments. Simply dumping the photos into a public directory
on some web server offers the viewer no easy way to scan the images; the viewer must pogostick
though each link one-by-one to view and save photos, unless the viewer is technically savvy and knows
how to use a utility like wget or an scp client.
These utilities would still require the user to download the images and then subsequently use some
image viewing software on their computer to view the images.
eSlides solves the photo-sharing problem in a fun and efficient manner. You download a collection of photos
from your camera onto your computer, type in a command to run eSlides to generate a web slideshow from the photos, and then
upload the output folder with the slideshow of the images onto a publicly viewable web server to share
your photos with the world. No excessive bandwidth cost to share the photos, no excessive CPU cost to
generate the slideshow, and no cost for the photo-sharing software.
1.3 What's new in version 2.0?
eSlides 2.0 supports the following new features:
- optional functionality to create tar file of full-size images with a link to the file into the slideshow.
- optional functionality to create drop shadows for thumbnails.
- faster thumbnail generation that runs an order of magnitude faster than eSlides 1.0.
- faster webpage load time by using scaled down images in the viewer window.
eSlides 1.0 used an open-source image manipulation application called
the GIMP to generate thumbnails. In version 2.0,
the eSlides program core was rewritten to use a lighter weight and more powerful image
manipulation utility called ImageMagick
for faster thumbnail generation and for thumbnail drop-shadow support.
Considerable development effort was invested to tuning performance optimizations in eSlides 2.0.
A 1.33 GHz PowerPC G4 Powerbook can generate web slides for 30 photos without drop shadows
in under 70 seconds and with drop shadows in under 100 seconds.
1.4 Requirements
Usage of eSlides only requires Perl, ImageMagick, and the eSlides code. Consult the
installation and usage instructions
for more details.
1.5 License
eSlides is an open-source application licensed under the
GNU Public License.
Thus, you are free to use, modify, and distribute the application.
4 Using eSlides to Generate Your Own Web Slides
eSlides provides a very simple command-line interface:
eSlides [-tar] [-shadow] input-dir "title"
For example, if your photos are stored in ~/photos/karaoke, and you would like to
title your web slideshow "Karaoke Night", run the following command in a terminal:
eSlides -tar -shadow ~/photos/karaoke "Karaoke Night"
This command creates a Karaoke-Night directory in your current working directory with an
index.html file that contains your web slideshow. The -tar flag bundles all your
images into a tar file and adds a link to the tar file in your slideshow so that people can easily download
your images. The -shadow flag generates fancy drop shadows for your thumbnail images but requires
slightly longer to run. Both flags are optional and can be omitted.
Note: At this time, the eSlides program does not support an input directory with spaces,
so if the path to your photos contains spaces, you will need to change directories to one such that
you can specify an input directory without spaces.
