imagesite

macOS's iPhoto software had a feature that exported photos to a static web site. iPhoto was discontinued in 2015. Its replacement, Photos, does not have that feature. imagesite approximates that feature.

imagesite HTML is similar, but not identical, to iPhoto's. imagesite's HTML is amateurishly styled, although somewhat less so than iPhoto's. On the bright side, imagesite's output includes an image's tags as well as its title and description.

Requirements

imagesite is developed and tested on Ruby 2.6.10, which comes with macOS 14 (Sonoma). It was previously tested on Ruby 2.3.7, which comes with macOS 10.12 (Sierra). If your Mac has an older or newer macOS, imagesite may or may not work with its built-in Ruby. If not, you may be able to install a newer or older Ruby on your Mac to use with imagesite.

Installation

• Install FreeImage. The easiest way to do that is probably with homebrew or MacPorts.

• If you're using the Ruby that comes with macOS,

  $ sudo gem install -v 1.5.11 nokogiri -- --with-cflags="-Wno-incompatible-function-pointer-types -Wno-incompatible-pointer-types-discards-qualifiers -Wno-compound-token-split-by-macro -Wno-int-conversion"
  $ sudo gem install imagesite
  

  If you're using a Ruby that you installed yourself, sudo may or may not be appropriate.

Usage

• Edit and annotate your images in Photos as usual.

• Export your images from Photos (select them and choose File ▶ Export ▶ Export Photos…, or type ⇧⌘E).

• Run imagesite in Terminal:

  $ imagesite -t 'Images' -o ~/Desktop/images ~/Desktop/images-export/*
  

  Replace 'Images' with whatever you'd like the title of the image set to be, ~/Desktop/images with whatever you'd like the output directory to be, and ~/Desktop/images-export with the directory into which you exported your images from Photos.

imagesite puts photos in its output in the order in which they're given to it on the command line. Unix, unlike Finder, sorts files whose names begin with numbers (such as those created by Photos' Sequential filename export option) in a way that requires leading zeros. You may, therefore, need to add leading zeros to your exported image filenames for * to list them in the order you want.

Customizing the output

Run imagesite -h to see more options.

imagesite's HTML is largely determined by two template files. To change them, run the following command to see where they are

$ gem contents imagesite

and edit them to your liking.

License

imagesite is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.