Gallery .... Blazermate's free Automatic Image Gallery Builder

Sick of fancy web-pages? Just want to see the images but don't want to wait and click and wait. Well we know how you feel. As providers of beautifully designed web pages for your business, we know how to do it. So we also know how to undo it! Gallery is a tiny program that you run on your PC to automatically create a new web page on your PC. When you open the new page in your browser all the images in a chosen series in a chosen remote or local directory will gradually appear, with no need of further attention from you. You could even minimise the browser window and get back to work on something else! A while later you go back and open the window and you have a gallery of images to see, even ones that you would have missed had you had the patience to try to open each picture individually from official pages on the remote site.

To review images that are not necessarily part of a series but which are in a folder on your computer, you might prefer Gallery-lite Inspector instead.

From November 1999, the program also produces a thumbnail file, so you can watch the images arriving.

[Warning] [Instructions] [Examples] [FAQ]

Warning:
This program is offered without warranty of any sort. If you are not comfortable with DOS utilities or are uncertain about your ability to assess the suitability of this software for your intended purpose then please do not use it.

This product is now in (perpetual) beta testing (thanks Hi etc.), if you really want to try it then feel free to download a trial copy. From October 2003 we accept that we are not going to do much more work on this tool. Therefore we have taken off the expiration date check. The current version (0.022) is the same as V0.021except for the removal of the July 2003 expiration date.

Instructions:
When you have found an image of interest that you think might be part of a series, copy the URL to the clipboard. The easiest way to do this is to right click on the image, then click "copy image location". Now run Gallery.

• When prompted "Where to start gathering?", type or paste the saved address using the DOS box paste button.
• When prompted "Enter page (optional).", you may type in a name for the resulting .htm file, if you just hit [Enter] the file will be named local.htm.
• When prompted "Image name base?", you may type in the first part of the image name, i.e., not including the directory, the extension or the digits that make it part of a series. Usually you will just hit [Enter] to accept the image base that Gallery has identified.
• When prompted for the image extension you may type in the extension (gif, jpg png etc.) but usually you will just hit [Enter] to accept the extension that Gallery has identified.
• When prompted "First number?", type in the first number to try, otherwise just hit [Enter] to start from zero, or 25 less than the number of the sample image.
• When prompted "Last number?", type in the last number to try, otherwise just hit [Enter] for 50, or 25 more than the number of the sample image.
• Processing will be complete in a flash (after all this is a DOS program!). Two new files will have been created in the current directory, one with your chosen name, or "local" .htm, the other with a similar name but with "_t" appended. Open either file with your browser and watch your gallery grow. (Actually the best way is to open a new browser window, then use the Open File in Browser command. You can minimise the window while the browser is fetching your images.) The file name ending in "_t.htm" is the thumbnail page. The other shows the images in their original shape and size but cannot be viewed in full until all the images are loaded.

If you like your gallery then we suggest that you run Gallery again using the correct first and last image numbers, and use a name other than local.htm so it will not get overwritten next time. If you have a file with the same name but with the extension .txt then the contents of this file will be placed above the first image on your new gallery page. If you know HTML you can put tags in this text file, but you don't have to.

Examples:

1. To build a gallery of images in a directory of your own PC, just run Gallery in that directory and leave the address blank, just hit [Enter] when prompted where to start gathering. You will then be able to see your pictures in one file without having to make thumbnails.
2. Suppose that you are interested in steam locomotive icons, and using a search engine you find the Putnam Station site at http://www.putnamstation.bc.ca/page4.html. You can see a few neat train graphics here. Right click one of the pictures, left click "Copy image location". Run Gallery. Paste the URL when asked for the address. Accept "img" when asked for the image name base. Accept "gif" when asked for the extension. Accept the defaults for start and stop. Now open the file local.htm with the browser. You will see that there are fifty more neat graphics developing on the screen. (You can try again with numbers more widely separated to find more pictures.) It looks like this resort is well worth a visit, if you like mountains!
3. There is a tutorial example here.

I have read and understood the warning above and I want to download Gallery.exe now.

If you enjoy using Gallery, a donation of $5, or any amount, would be appreciated. Send by snail mail in a plain brown envelope. Any currency welcome (even obscure foreign notes are welcomed by our local church charities).

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Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. Gallery itself runs very fast but the first time I look at the page it has made the pictures take ages to develop. The next time I look at the same page the pictures appear at once. Why?
A. Gallery just uses information you provide, you don't even have to be on line to use it, that's why it is fast. But when you open the page it has made, your browser has to fetch each picture from wherever it is, this will take a long time if there are many big pictures. We suggest that you minimise the browser window and work on something else for a while, let the page load in the background. The next time you look at your page, the browser will find copies of the pictures in its cache so it loads them quickly. Even if you visit the official page from which you have collected the pictures, after you have loaded the gallery page once, the pictures there will load quickly for the same reason.

Q. Some pictures look normal on the official page but are huge in the gallery page.
A. Yes, these pictures (sometimes on photographers' pages) are posted by the authors in full detail so that viewers can make better copies on a printer. The original page transmits the full printable picture plus the dimensions of a reduced frame to show on the browser screen. For example, the big and small banners above and below this FAQ are both representations of the same image on the server. As Gallery does not know the intended screen size, it always uses the natural, or printer size. Sorry if that means that you cannot see her head and feet at the same time.

Q. Where should I put Gallery on my PC?
A. There is only one file, gallery.exe. Ideally, it should be in any directory included in your DOS path. Alternatively, if you always work from a particular directory, e.g. 'My documents', or 'work', or 'trash' etc., then put it there. If you know what you are doing then you can put it on your 'desktop'.

Q. Will Gallery run under Windows 3?
A. Yes.

Q. Will Gallery run on a Mac.?
A. No.

Q. Will you do a version to run on a Mac.?
A. One day, if enough people ask.

Q. What will the Windows version be like?
A. It will take 10 times as long to download and will run at half the speed. It will probably not be free. It will be late.

Q. (not frequently asked but important, unfortunately) Some days ago I have downloaded 'gallery' and it works without any problems, but now I've found a webpage on which it has problems to get the pictures. Maybe you can take a look at it: http://britney.undeniable.com/picturesb.shtml. And that's the link of the first picture... http://britney.undeniable.com/images_britney_spears/ubs01.jpg.
A. It looks like you have found a site that is resistant to Gallery. We think they are trying to stop other sites from refering to their pictures. The aim is to maximise advertising revenue while minimising traffic charges, of course. When we tried the image URL below the server returns:
"Forbidden, You do not have permission to access the requested file on this server."
We get this for each image URL except the one appearing on an "shtml" page, even if open in a different window. We are afraid that we can't see a solution for this problem yet. If anyone can think of a work-around then it will appear in a future release.
We're sorry that Gallery has let you down this time but hope that you can still have some fun with it.

Q. I can't find the paste button in Windows NT.
A. Nor can we. Try this: click the tiny MSDOS icon in the top left of the window; click edit; click paste.