Balder – Open source photo gallery built with Ruby on Rails

• Public gallery showcase
• Homepage
• Source on GitHub

So you got lots of photos, yeah? Tried installing some PHP-gallery and it sucked? Or bought a Flickr Pro-account but want more control of how your photo collection is displayed (or still want access to your data when you stop paying them)? Fear not; Balder is here for the rescue.

As a result of a project with two photographers I did this summer I have now open sourced the code and named it Balder. It is a photo gallery built in Ruby on Rails. It aims to be minimalistically beautiful and simple to use. Look at it as Flickr on your own server – without the social features that is.

So what can it do?

• Organize in albums (as events in iPhoto)
• Combine albums in collections (as albums in iPhoto)
• Stores photos to disk in folders
• Create multiple thumbnails of custom sizes
• Read and writes EXIF/IPTC title, description and keywords
• Upload multiple photos in one go (can also scan existing folder structure)
• Tag photos. Can also tag albums (or the result is that all photos in the album is tagged)
• User management with roles and permissions
• Geo-location of albums & photos with Google Maps integration.

If you want to see it in action look no further than to this domain. After my 10-month trip in 2008 I took a few photos and you can see a selection at photos.inspired.no.

And this is how it looks for the administrator:

Upload multiple photos with live progress:

Add albums to collection:

Want to try it out? Head over to BalderApp.com for this free open source Ruby on Rails photo gallery or go directly to the source-code which you can find at both GitHub and Gitorious.