I use the Windows Picture and Scanner Wizard whenever I’m taking pictures off of my digital camera, so all of my pictures are stored in neat little albums. When I wanted to put these online, I couldn’t find a good ASP.NET that I could just point at this directory structure and make it work. Thus, a long time ago, I wrote PictureViewer. It’s a small little ASP.NET application that does thumbnailing, caching, pagination, image-prefetching and the like. I’m making my picture viewer available under the zlib license to whoever wants to consume it.
Setting it up should be super simple.
- Download and unpack the zip on your IIS web server and edit the web.config file.
- There are a couple of key configs. ImageDirectory points to your picture collection. ThumbDirectory points to where you want the thumbnails cached. I suggest making a directory for thumbnails in your ImageDirectory. It’s smart enough not to show the thumbnail folder in the album view if it’s in your ImageDirectory.
- Add script mappings in IIS for .jpg, .gif and .avi to point to ASP.NET (see this image for an example)
- Ensure that IIS had read access to your image directory and write access to the thumbs directory
That’s about it. Let me know if you end up using it or have any feedback.
Download PictureViewer v1.0.