Photopager-X -- Help

A quick run-through of what it does, how, and how to get the best quality out of it.

What it does

Photopager-X takes a folder of photos and video clips and turns it into a single, self-contained web page -- a browsable gallery with thumbnails, a full-size lightbox view, and simple navigation. Once generated, upload the whole output folder to any web host and share the link.

What it accepts

Getting good quality

Export as Unmodified from Photos, not as JPEG. If you pre-export your photos as JPEG from Photos and then let Photopager-X compress them again, you get two lossy JPEG passes stacked on top of each other -- extra generation loss for no benefit, and sometimes a bigger file than necessary. Exporting Unmodified (HEIC, as Photos stores it) means Photopager-X's own compression is the only lossy pass that happens.

In Photos: select your photos → File → Export → Export Unmodified Original(s), then point Photopager-X at that export folder.

As a safety net, Photopager-X also checks its own output against the original for any JPEG source: if recompressing a photo would somehow make it larger than the original file, it uses the original instead rather than serve a worse result. You'll see a note in the log if this ever happens -- it's rare, but it means you can't accidentally end up with a bigger, lower-quality file than what you started with.

Full-size cap & JPEG quality

Full-size cap sets the maximum width/height (in pixels) for the large version shown in the lightbox. Bigger numbers mean sharper full-screen viewing but larger files and slower loading on a slow connection. JPEG quality controls compression -- higher is better quality and bigger files, lower is smaller and blurrier. The defaults (1600px / 82%) are a reasonable middle ground for a gallery people will view on a laptop or phone.

Social share previews (Open Graph)

Fill in Share URL with wherever you're going to upload the gallery (e.g. https://soul-trade.com/carlisle/) and Photopager-X will add the metadata tags that let Facebook, X, WhatsApp and similar sites show a proper preview card -- title, thumbnail, and link -- when someone shares or pastes the gallery link, rather than a bare URL with nothing to look at.

Share preview image lets you pick which photo becomes that thumbnail by typing its filename (e.g. IMG_4651.jpg). Leave it blank and the first photo (alphabetically) is used automatically.

Leave Share URL blank entirely and none of this happens -- no tags are added, and the gallery works exactly as a plain page with no share preview.

Date & location captions

Two independent toggles let you show, in the full-size lightbox view only (not on the thumbnail grid), the date a photo was taken and/or the place it was taken -- read from each photo's own embedded metadata. Either toggle can be on, off, or both, in any combination.

Worth checking before publishing: if you turn on Location, double-check none of the photos in the folder reveal somewhere you'd rather not make public -- home, a friend's house, and so on, although it isn't pinpoint only nearest big town or city. This is off by default for exactly that reason.

Uploading the finished gallery

The output folder contains index.html plus thumbs/ and full/ subfolders. Upload the whole folder, keeping that structure intact, to your web host -- via FTP (Fetch), your host's file manager, or however you normally publish to soul-trade.com. The gallery is entirely self-contained; it doesn't need a database or any server-side code to run.