Note: I have forked this from Greer, and added support for Lightbox. To use it, follow the instructions Photo gallery for Jekyll with Lightbox

This is a Jekyll plugin that generates galleries from directories full of images. It uses RMagick to create thumbnails.

This plugin is quite minimalist. It generates galleries with no pagination, no sub-galleries, and no descriptions. See my gallery for an example of what it looks like.

brew install imagemagick
sudo gem install rmagick
sudo gem install exifr

That's what I had to do on OS X. You may need to use different commands.

cp gallery_generator.rb jekyll-site/_plugins/
cp gallery_index.html jekyll-site/_layouts/
cp gallery_page.html jekyll-site/_layouts/

Copy your image directories into jekyl-site/photos/. Here's what my directory structure looks like:

% ls jekyll-site/photos
best/                   chile_trip/             japan_trip/
% ls jekyll-site/photos/chile_trip
IMG_1039.JPG  IMG_1046.JPG  IMG_1057.JPG  ...

Run jekyll and be patient. It can take a while to generate all the thumbnails on the first run. After that, you should have pretty pictures.

If you want to have a different path than /photos/, set gallery_dir in your _config.yml. You can also set favorite images that get shown on the index page. Here's what my _config.yml looks like:

gallery_dir: photos
galleries:
  chile_trip:
    best_image: IMG_1068.JPG
  japan_trip:
    best_image: IMG_0690.JPG
  best:
    best_image: snaileo_gonzales.jpg

If you don't set a best_image for a gallery, the generator will use the last image. All images and galleries are sorted chronologically by the best_image.