Updatable online foto collection?

[AES/newspost]

I'd like to have a link on my home page that would point to a collection
of images in a folder such that users could go to and view any of the
images in that folder using just their browser -- and the collection of
viewable images could be updated at any time just by adding or deleting
images to the folder, with NO html re-coding, anywhere.

Not a "photo album" in the usual sense -- no thumbnails or captions or
commentary for the individual images are needed, and individual images
in the folder can be identified to the user only by their file names [1].

I have the impression something like this can be done in ftp. But can
any form of standard html coding [2] access the directory of a folder
[3] and automatically create a kind of auto-updated index page with
links to each individual file or document currently in that folder?
[1] Seems like this could be handy for documents as well as images.

[2] If someone can give me the name of the html command, I can look up
the details. But, sorry, if it involves javascripting or other more
sophisticated stuff, that's going to be beyond the level that I'll be
able to handle.

[3] In Unix jargon a "folder" is a "directory", right? But is there a
separate term for the list of file names in that directory -- the
"directory" of the "directory"?

[Spartanicus]

AES/newspost <si*****@stanford.edu> wrote:

I'd like to have a link on my home page that would point to a collection
of images in a folder such that users could go to and view any of the
images in that folder using just their browser -- and the collection of
viewable images could be updated at any time just by adding or deleting
images to the folder, with NO html re-coding, anywhere.

Not a "photo album" in the usual sense -- no thumbnails or captions or
commentary for the individual images are needed, and individual images
in the folder can be identified to the user only by their file names [1].

Create a directory for the images and then configure your web server to
allow directory browsing for that directory (typically defaults to off).

--
Spartanicus

[Toby Inkster]

AES/newspost wrote:

I have the impression something like this can be done in ftp. But can
any form of standard html coding [2] access the directory of a folder
[3] and automatically create a kind of auto-updated index page with
links to each individual file or document currently in that folder?

Nothing to do with HTML. You have to configure your web server to create
an automatic index whenever there is no "index.html" file[1] in a
directory and then make sure that there *is* no index.html in the
directory.

If you're using Apache (and about 70% of web servers are Apache) then
create a text file called ".htaccess" (yes the leading dot is important!)
and put the following two lines in it:

Options +Indexes
DirectoryIndex 34635634563455.html

(The filename 34635634563455.html isn't important -- it just needs to be
a file that doesn't exist!)

Then place that file in the directory in question.

[1] Some web servers will use different names such as "default.html" as
the index.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact