Python & XML

Building an Image Index

If you’ve ever visited an image library on the Internet, you’ve probably enjoyed (even taken for granted) the way a collection of small thumbnail images acts as links for full-sized counterparts. Many artists, when presenting a portfolio online, adopt this effective approach to displaying their work. With the rise of digital cameras and scanners, more and more people are finding themselves pulling directories full of images onto the Web in a format that makes for easy browsing. In the next section, we build a Python script that takes a full directory of images and thumbnail images and creates a master HTML page with the thumbnails acting as links to the full-size image. The saxthumbs.py program expects you to have a pre-existing directory of images and thumbnails, and operates on the output of the index.py script we created earlier.

In order for the saxthumbs.py SAX handler to correctly process a thumbnail directory, the images need to follow a naming convention (easily changeable by editing the code). Currently, the saxthumbs.py handler expects to find file elements within the XML document that have a corresponding <imagename>.jpg file that is the entire image, and a t-<imagename>.jpg file that is a thumbnail-size image.

When using index.py to create a list of your image files, point it to a directory that has image files named accordingly:

$> ls -l *newimage* -rw-rw-r-- 1 shm00 shm00 98197 Jan 18 11:08 newimage.jpg -rw-rw-r-- 1 shm00 shm00 5272 Jan 18 11:42 ...