rostigerIt's finally done! #ocular can now automatically post images to your mastodon account - huzzah!
Host your own tiny static image feed, join the webring and share images #smallweb style!
Boosts appreciated. 
occult
damaru@damaru Thanks! I find it very enjoyable to use. Let me know if you ever give it a shot.
lee@rostiger Congrats on this!
Let's say I just wanted to create a series of image galleries, and maybe didn't care about a comment system, would okular still be a good choice?
Also, a great next step would be to host a web-based tutorial (if there is one, i didn't immediately find it).
@exquisitecorp Sure! ocular has no comment system per se, uploading to Mastodon (which is completely optional) serves that function.
You can have multiple galleries by creating multiple project directories where the script lives in each of them. You can't build different galleries with one command though, you would need to build each gallery separately and manually.
The setup and usage instructions currently live in the readme in the repo. Is there anything you are missing? Or do you think better communication on where to find the instructions would be enough?
@rostiger thanks, that's helpful info re multiple galleries.
In terms of install and running okular, WHERE do i put my photos? does okular resize them? do i need to name them anything in particular? how do i add captions?
i'd add the output of okular -h to your README. on looking at the script it seems like maybe you use okular -a and then add a single image at a time? i'm not certain.
i guess i was expecting i'd drop images in a folder, have a text file with captions or titles, and then run your script. i'm thinking that assumption is incorrect.
@rostiger basically, i had assumed it was a static site generator for image galleries, something like faircamp-ish. but it sounds like you individually add photos.
@exquisitecorp Ah, that's valuable feedback, thank you! I need to clarify the intention of ocular: it's more of a smallweb replacement for platforms like instagram or pixelfed. Unlike many gallery systems out there where you take a bunch of pictures and it creates a gallery, ocular is for sharing pictures one by one, creating a feed of images. Instead of uploading an image to a platform, you add the image locally, build the gallery and upload the whole thing. With each upload, the feeds from the webring are pulled and integrated in the gallery.
This is also why you don't put any images anywhere than were they already are on your computer. ocular will create a database with the absolute paths to the image, which can be anywhere on your computer. It creates differently sized previews and stores them inside its project directory, but the originals will stay untouched.
@exquisitecorp I updated the readme for more clarity, I hope this helps:
arcade w.
bouncepaw 🍄@rostiger awesome! Congratulations.
Does it publish every new image? Can I publish only some of them? If I edit an old image (is that a thing?), would the Mastodon post be edited as well?
@bouncepaw No to most of these. :) It's a fairly simple system that only ever posts the last added image to Mastodon. If you delete or edit it and want the changes reflected on masto, you will have to do that manually.
@bouncepaw But yes, you can always choose if you want an image posted to masto or not.
@rostiger this is most important! Thank you
Alien🍉@rostiger congratulations 
It might sound stupid but I really needed something like this to exist right now and I'm so happy and thankful
It might sound stupid but I really needed something like this to exist right now and I'm so happy and thankful
paloma kop ⁂@rostiger it looks very nice. i've been enjoying following the RSS feed of the entire webring. i was thinking of setting up something similar myself, but i think the digital journal i made myself is filling the niche for me for now...
@palomakop Thanks, glad to hear it speaks to you. Totally vaild to run your own setup, too! If you are interested in participating in the webring, you can still do that, even with your own structure, as long as the rss feed accommodates the webring conventions:
@rostiger yeah, maybe i should make a pics-only version of the rss feed for this ... since i can have more than one image per journal entry, but i have the images saved separately in the db. something to think about :)
@rostiger i had to go into my journal code to fix images from my phone coming out upside-down... so i'm going to take a stab at the new images rss feed ^-^
@palomakop Cool! You could set it up that when you add an image to a post you could give it a special tag that your generator parses and builds it into the rss feed along with the link to the post. This way, when someone clicks the image in the webring it would lead directly to your post.
@rostiger well, i was thinking of adding a text link to the post in my cdata, hmm, so many ways to do it haha... once i have something working, could i ask you to double check and maybe give feedback on my implementation of the webring patterns before i join?
@palomakop Sure, I'd be happy to! I don't think it's necessary to put it in the CDATA, as the minimum requirements for the webring will probably be lowered to this:
https://forum.merveilles.town/thread/114/subversivepics-aggregating-image-galleries-29/
@rostiger ok, here's my new feed: https://journal.palomakop.tv/images.xml just wanna double check that i read the info correctly and my feed is OK before i make the pull request to join! btw i also made a webpage version https://journal.palomakop.tv/images :)
@palomakop Nice! This looks spot on, well done!
@rostiger sweet! ok, i opened a pull request on the repo.
Tova Bele@rostiger this is really great. i have been looking for a way out of corporate image hosting and sharing. i read through the repo docu, it all seems doable. i have a webserver, just need to check how to access it without “their” online toolset.
one big question though: depending on where i am, i use different machines (linux laptop, osx macbook and win desktop)
Do you think this works with posting to the gallery, or are there local dependencies that need to be synced?
@tovabele Nice! Happy to hear you'd like to give it a shot.
I have only tested it on Ubuntu, where all of the dependencies are already pre-installed. Theoretically it should be possible to use on a Mac, since afaik MacOS also comes with commands such as mkdir, cp, rm, rsync and curl preinstalled. I have never tried it, but I'd be curious if it works for sure!
As for windows, I have no idea what would be needed to get it up an running, but I'm pretty confident that it won't run out of the box.
Anyway, if you do try it, let me know how it goes or if you run into any issues. :3