Sentinel Gallery

Sentinel is developed by György Balássy to create the simplest photo gallery that supports super-easy image publishing.

If you have any comments, questions, tips or ideas, do not hesitate to contact me via e-mail (balassy at aut.bme.hu) or Twitter (@gyorgybalassy).

Features

Simple publishing

Just create a separate folder for each of your galleries in the Photos folder, and then add your JPG and PNG images to it. Sentinel will automatically list the folders as galleries, and displays the image files in them.

You can add new galleries any time without recompiling and republishing the website. Create a new folder, add your images to it and you are done!

You can change the default folder which contains the galleries in the web.config file:

<Sentinel>
    <Galleries storageFolderVirtualPath="~/Photos" ... />
</Sentinel>

Login with a single password

Sentinel does not require a login name, but only a login password to access the galleries and the images. This makes sharing the images much easier for you, and also easier for your visitors to access them on a mobile device.

Gallery thumbnails

When a gallery folder contains a folder.jpg file, Sentinel uses it as the thumbnail image for the gallery (just like in Windows Explorer).

If there is no folder.jpg file in the gallery folder, then it is automatically generated by resizing the first image. Note however, that this feature requires the process account to have write permission to the gallery folder.

If the process account does not have write permission to the gallery folder, or you do not want Sentinel to automatically create the gallery thumbnails, then you can turn off this behavior in the web.config file by setting the autoGenerateThumbnails attribute to false :

<Sentinel>
	<Galleries autoGenerateThumbnails="true" ... />
</Sentinel>

Localization

Sentinel supports multiple display languages. By default the site is displayed in English, but if the client requests another display language and localization is available, then Sentinel will display localized texts.

Currently only Hungarian localization is provided, but you can add support for new languages by translating the .resx files in the Resources folder.

Sentinel relies on the language detection mechanism of ASP.NET to select the display language. To turn of automatic language detection and force a selected language, modify te web.config file:

<globalization culture="auto" uiCulture="auto" ... />

Responsive design and touch support

Sentinel uses responsive design and supports touch navigation, to correctly display your galleries and images on devices with different form factors.

Note however, that currently Sentinel neither resize nor optimize the images for smaller displays and slower or metered network connections, and always the full image files are downloaded!

Installation

Build and publish the source code. The default login password is demo. You can change it in the following section in the web.config file by setting the SHA1 hash of your desired password:

<user name="demo" password="89e495e7941cf9e40e6980d14a16bf023ccd4c91" /> 

Technology showcase

Sentinel is built using the following technologies:

• Server-side:

  • ASP.NET MVC 5
  • ASP.NET Bundling and minification
  • Compiled MVC views
  • Code contracts
  • Custom configuration handlers
  • Localization
  • T4MVC
  • Ninject for dependency injection

• Client-side:

  • Bootstrap
  • LESS
  • jQuery
  • jQuery Validate

Licensing

You are free to use this source code for anything you want, however please note that the code is provided as-is, without any warranty or support.

If you like or use this project, please be so kind and drop me a message about it.

About the author

György Balássy is a software architect, speaker, author, teacher, ethical hacker from Budapest, Hungary. You can reach and follow him via his blog or his @gyorgybalassy Twitter page.