I wanted to self-host my pictures. Nothing crazy, just a way to share them with my friends without using a third party service. At first, I thought about writing a lighttpd module that would generate thumbnails. Then I thought about a using a php script, but all of them have too many options, and are too complicated for what I intended to do. I wanted something simple and secure (e.g. no upload interface)! Then I thought about how this blog is built: using a static blog generator! Did it exist for galleries?

It turns out that yes, there are plenty of solutions available. I tested some of them, and I found that sigal was my prefered one.

Sigal is beautiful, and minimalistic. It lets you theme your gallery with jinja templates, exactly like pelican. Furthermore, it is mature and very well maintained (my main concern when I install something): there is a testsuite, a good online documentation (not that it needs it, it is dead simple to use) and continuous integration. There is even two demo galleries, for you to test it live before installing it. And of course, for maximal conveniency, there is a python package, that you can install very simply: just run

pip install sigal

The only thing that I was missing was video support. I sometimes film short movies with my cameras, and I want to include them in the pictures that I am sharing. I thus decided to give a go to the code, in order to see if it easy to patch. It turned out to be rather easy. There's a pull request pending...

TL;DR you should try sigal!