Scribbles and Snaps

The pLoader utility offers the most convenient and efficient way of adding photos to your Piwigo-based gallery directly from your desktop. While the official Piwigo extension repository provides a compiled version of pLoader, if you prefer to use the very latest release of the utility, you should download and run the most recent version available in the SVN repository.

The first order of business is to install all the required packages. On Ubuntu and its derivatives, this can be done using the following command:

sudo apt-get install subversion perl libwx-perl-processstream-perl libfile-slurp-perl libfile-homedir-perl libjson-perl libdigest-md5-file-perl libimage-exiftool-perl perlmagick libcrypt-cbc-perl libcrypt-des-perl libclass-accessor-perl

Next, point your browser to http://piwigo.org/svn/extensions/pLoader/tags/ and note the most recent version of pLoader (e.g., 1.6). Open the Terminal and run the command below:

svn export http://piwigo.org/svn/extensions/pLoader/tags/1.6 pLoader

This will download the latest release of pLoader in the pLoader folder in your home directory. That’s all there is to it.

To launch pLoader, open the Terminal switch to the bin directory and execute the pLoader.pl:

cd /pLoader/bin/
pl pLoader.pl

To avoid opening the Terminal and typing the commands every time you want to launch pLoader, you can create a simple Bash script. Create a new text file containing the following commands:

#!/bin/bash
cd /pLoader/src/
perl pLoader.pl

Save the file as the pLoader.sh script, and make it executable using the chmod a+x pLoader.sh command. You can then launch pLoader by double-clicking on the script.