Simple Gals - A no-frills HTML image gallery generator

⦾ Simple Gals

This post announces "simple gals", or simpleGals stylized. This is my first new semi-serious open source project in a long time. Like bitmath I had an itch I needed to scratch. And that itch was the apparent lack of a modern day "simple HTML image gallery generator".

Back in my day, on Mac the Photos application had this nifty feature. You could export a gallery to a simple HTML bundle with forward/backward nagivation. It looked a lot like they used the DocBook XSL stylesheets to generate a simple thing that worked really well. Speaking of which, I still have an example of thing I"m talking about.

⦾ The Grand Library

The Grand Library is one of the first big planned on graph-paper projects I made in Minecraft, back when I was in college and it was still IN ALPHA v1.1.2_01. According to the wiki, this screenshot must have been taken between the ass-end of September and October 30th, 2010.

You can see the rest of that gallery here with (most of) the full build from beginning to end.

I think I had a screen recording, or screenshots of, a giant library burning (after we backed up the world files). It brought the server (probably my old macbook) to its knees. It was rough, buddy. But that's what we did back then: we mined, crafted, and burned shit down/blew shit up. Not much has changed really.

⦾ Inspiration

That Apple generated HTML image gallery is the inspiration for simpleGals. It's so stupid simple. Rows. Columns. Pagination. Click to view full size. It's perfection.

But they took that away from us.

⦾ Modern Features (and anti-features)

simpleGals takes those core functions and extends them to work better in 2026.

simpleGals is trying to be a very simple command-line driven static HTML image gallery generating tool. simpleGals just like to have fun, it doesn't want you getting bogged down with all the tedious overhead associated with fancy gals, running software that has to get patched, or paying another subscription. simpleGals ain't like that.

simpleGals isn't for album management. You feed simpleGals directories of images and in return you get some simple HTML files with thumbnails.

simpleGals inserts some simple javascript for quality of life enhancements. But exactly 0 user-facing functionality requires javascript. The functionality degrades gracefully to a simple point and click adventure, just like the old days.

simpleGals has a full TUI interface for configuring projects and modifying properties. The sgui tui can rebuild the gallery, just as well as the batch simpleGals command. There are progress bars, because I was feeling fancy.

Also, you get actual image-previews IN THE CONSOLE when you're setting captions/alt text, or toggling individual "include in gallery" options.