Let’s imagine that you want to build a page that will display snapshots of your latest work. One way to do this would be to hard-code the images into your document. The obvious repercussion is that, every time you want to add a new item, you must manually update your html document. Another method would be to store and retrieve the information from a MYSQL database. This will function perfectly, though for many sites, this solution may possibly offer far more power than is technically needed – not to mention the increase in hosting costs.
In such instances, the best solution is to make PHP scan your “portfolio” folder and dynamically create the code for you. If you want to update your page with a new snapshot, all that you need to do is drag the image, and its respective thumbnail, into the appropriate folders – and PHP will do the rest. Let’s build it now!
Our Mission
Let’s briefly outline what we need to accomplish.
- Use PHP to scan our portfolio folder. It will then cyle through each file, that is an image, and then display it on the page.
- Style our content a bit using CSS.
- When the users clicks on a thumbnail, we’ll use jQuery to load the large version of the image in the main panel.
- If the user has Javascript disabled, he’ll simply be directed to a new page that contains the full-sized image
How to Use It
Adding a new image to our portfolio is simple. Take a snapshot of your website, brochure, postcard, etc and size it to 500px x 350px. Place this image within the “images/featured” folder.
Next, create a thumbnail that is 50px x 50px. Place this image within the “images/tn” folder.
You must make sure that both the full-sized and the thumbnail images have the exact same file name.
Our Final HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Scanning Directories with PHP</title>
<script src="js/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="js/scripts.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<h1>Some Portfolio</h1>
<div id="featured">
<?php
$featured_dir = 'images/featured/';
$scan = scandir($featured_dir);
echo '<img src="'. $featured_dir . $scan[2] . '" alt="image" />';
?>
</div>
<ul id="options">
<?php
$dir = 'images/tn/';
$scan = scandir($dir);
for ($i=0; $i<count($scan); $i++) {
if ($scan[$i] != '.' && $scan[$i] != '..') {
echo '
<li>
<a href="' . $featured_dir . $scan[$i] . '">
<img src="'. $dir . $scan[$i] . '" alt="'. $scan[$i] . '" />
</a>
</li>';
}
}
?>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Our Final CSS
Compensating For IE6
Luckily, we only have one thing to fix. If you look at the image above, you’ll see that the #options unordered list is not containing its floated list items. While modern browsers will correctly clear the items thanks to our “overflow: hidden;” style, IE6 needs one more rule. Append this to your stylesheet.
ul#options {
...misc styles...
height: 1%;
}
I could have set the height to anything and it would still work. Think of it as Drago punching IE6 in the face and telling it, “Wake up!”. This style forces IE6 to expand as much as is need to clear its children.
The Complete Javascript(jQuery)
$(function() {
$.preloadImage = function(path) {
$("#featured img").attr("src", path);
}
$('ul#options li img').click(function() {
$('ul li img').removeClass('selected');
$(this).addClass('selected');
var imageName = $(this).attr('alt');
$.preloadImage('images/featured/' + imageName);
var chopped = imageName.split('.');
$('#featured h2').remove();
$('#featured')
.prepend('
' + chopped[0] + '
').children('h2').fadeIn(500).fadeTo(200, .6);
});
$('ul#options li a').click(function() {
return false;
});
});
Extra Credit
There are ways to create thumbnails of our images dynamically. Try to find a way to make PHP scan our “featured” folder and then dynamically create a thumbnail version and save it within the “tn” folder.
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By Jeffrey Way
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One question: If we were working with a list of files (pdfs in my case) and wanted to sort them a specific way, is there any way we could do so? For me, I wanted to sort the list by date since I want most recent newsletters to appear at the top. Any help would be appreciated.
http://californians.berkeley.edu I noticed the link didn’t work above so thought i’d try retyping it without the parens.
In additional You can add a Exif PHP functions for getting Image exif information
2Jeffrey Way
Thnx, but…
If 500 images in folder…?
May be create listing (1 page = 50 pics)
We want see video “How get listing ?”
Hey, a question, how would it be possible to have a button go to the next image in the list?
Great tutorial for beginers, but with programmatical mistakes in PHP:
- better than scandir() (witch returns folders and files) is work with files only – glob() or some user function can do that.
- foreach($scan as $val) is better than for($i=0;$i<count($scan);$i++), you don’t need to now how many files are there, you only need process all of them.
I’m almost a total NOOB! how can I modify this code to say scan a text based html filesystem and create dynamic links.
I have a number of growing folders that contain html stories and I need a way to organize them.
a modification of this code could work for an index system right?
Try this, worked for me:
<?php
$dir = ‘files/’;
$scan = scandir($dir);
for ($i = 0; $i<count($scan); $i++) {
if ($scan[$i] != ‘.’ && $scan[$i] != ‘..’) {
echo ‘
‘ . $scan[$i]. ‘
‘;
}
};
?>
I use this bit of code instead, this way I don’t have to make a thumbnail. I use it to display wallpapers I make. Since I don’t know RegEx, this is the best way for me:
<?php
function getFileDetails($dir)
{
$files = array();
$allowed = array(‘jpg’, ‘gif’, ‘png’);
$i = 0;
if ( ($h = opendir($dir)) == false )
{
die(‘Error: Could not open directory.’);
}
while ( false !== ($file = readdir($h)) )
{
$parts = explode(‘.’, $file);
$cnt = count($parts)-1;
$ext = $parts[$cnt];
if ( in_array($ext, $allowed) == true )
{
$files[$i]['filename'] = $parts[0];
$files[$i]['filelink'] = $dir.$file;
$dimensions = getimagesize($dir.$file);
$files[$i]['filedim'] = $dimensions[0].’ x ‘.$dimensions[1];
$kb = number_format(filesize($dir.$file)/1024, 0, ”, ”).’ kb’;
$mb = number_format($kb/1024, 2, ‘.’, ”).’ mb’;
$files[$i]['filesize'] = $kb.’ (‘.$mb.’)';
$files[$i]['filetype'] = ( $ext == ‘jpg’ ) ? strtoupper(‘jpeg’) : strtoupper($ext);
$i++;
}
}
$h = closedir($h);
return $files;
}
function FileDetailsList($dir)
{
$files = getFileDetails($dir);
$list = ”;
for ( $i = 0; $i < count($files); $i++ )
{
$thumbsrc = ‘data:image/jpeg;base64,’.base64_encode(exif_thumbnail($files[$i]['filelink']));
$list .= ‘‘.$files[$i]['filename'].’‘;
$list .= ”;
$list .= ‘Preview: ‘;
$list .= ‘Screen Resolution: ‘.$files[$i]['filedim'].”;
$list .= ‘Filesize: ‘.$files[$i]['filesize'].”;
$list .= ‘Image Type: ‘.$files[$i]['filetype'].”;
$list .= ”;
$list .= ”;
}
$list .= ”;
return $list;
}
?>
That last function should be this, sorry!
function FileDetailsList($dir)
{
$files = getFileDetails($dir);
$list = ‘<ul>’;
for ( $i = 0; $i Preview:</span> <a href=”‘.$files[$i]['filelink'].’”><img src=”‘.$thumbsrc.’” /></a></li>’;
$list .= ‘<li><span>Screen Resolution:</span> ‘.$files[$i]['filedim'].’</li>’;
$list .= ‘<li><span>Filesize:</span> ‘.$files[$i]['filesize'].’</li>’;
$list .= ‘<li><span>Image Type:</span> ‘.$files[$i]['filetype'].’</li>’;
$list .= ‘</ul>’;
$list .= ‘</li>’;
}
$list .= ‘</ul>’;
return $list;
}
i need a preview comment button! anyways, this was the import part of the 2nd function:
$thumbsrc = ‘data:image/jpeg;base64,’.base64_encode(exif_thumbnail($files[$i]['filelink']));
although when rendered, the source is HUGE
This is a great tutorial and exactly what I need for a project of mine!
I am wondering though, in the if statement you said you could exclude certain file types, is there is a way to exclude an entire file?
I have a file within the directory I am scanning and it is being added to the array. If anyone can help me to add the exception to the if statement that would help me a ton!
thanks!
It’s a great tutorial but is it possible to do this with .flv’s, or any other type of video file? I want it to create a text-link (instead of the thumbnail) that opens the .flv where the full-size pic is. i have tried my best but im not that good at php and scripts yet.
i am a beginner with php, actually i really don’t know it at all, but this what i have been looking for. but is there a way to have the thumbnails open up with lightbox rather than display the larger image above the thumbnails the way they do in the demo?
This would be the perfect script if you didn’t still have to create thumbnails for it. It’s fine if you have a couple of images, but a large gallery would be a pain.
Oh Jeffrey you never cease to impress. This is exactly what I was looking for.
Thanks..
i took me a little while to figure out the error in my code but this really works
Great tutorial. Is it possible to has a search function that will allow a user to search for a specific file name?
Thanks..Wonderful tutorial !!
A shorter solution for displaying thumb images:
$dir=’images/tn’;
$scan=array_slice(scandir($dir),2);
foreach ($scan as $image)
{
echo “\n”;
}