Image galleries

The BBS includes a browser-native image gallery system at /gallery/.
A sysop can publish any directory of images on the host as a labelled
collection; users browse a paginated thumbnail grid and click for a
full-screen modal viewer.

How users see it

Top-bar Tools → Image Galleries opens /gallery/.
Each gallery card shows label, description, image count.
Click a gallery → paginated thumbnail grid (60 per page).
Click any thumbnail → full-screen modal at native resolution.
Click anywhere or press Esc to close.

Where the data lives

Galleries are configured in gallery-config.json at the BBS install
root (/path/to/anetbbs/gallery-config.json). The file is auto-seeded
on first run if it doesn't already exist, but you can edit it freely or use the admin UI.

Schema:

[
  {
    "slug": "gifs",
    "label": "90s GIFs Galore",
    "path": "/opt/anetbbs/data/galleries/gifs",
    "description": "6,500+ classic 90s GIFs.",
    "is_active": true,
    "sort_order": 10
  }
]

slug — URL-safe identifier (must be unique). Becomes part of the URL
(/gallery/<slug>/). Cannot be changed after creation via admin UI.
label — display name shown on cards and page titles.
path — absolute directory containing the images. The directory is
scanned at request time; no separate index is maintained.
description — optional one-line caption shown on the gallery picker.
is_active — false to hide the gallery without removing it.
sort_order — lower numbers appear first; ties broken by label.

Files at the path are picked up if their extension matches:
.jpg .jpeg .gif .png .bmp .webp (case-insensitive) — or .zip.

Zip archives (Digital Showroom-style): point a gallery at a
directory that holds one photo per .zip instead of (or alongside)
loose image files, and each archive is thumbnailed/viewed by extracting
its one image member on the fly — nothing is ever unpacked to disk.
This is the format some TIC-fed file areas already arrive in (e.g. a
daily NASA photo feed) — you can point a gallery straight at the same
storage_path a matching file area already unpacks TIC into, with zero
extra conversion step. A zip with more than one image inside just shows
the first (by name); a zip with no images inside 404s cleanly if
someone clicks it.

The deploy rsync should --exclude=gallery-config.json so deploys
don't clobber a sysop's gallery list. The default deploy command in
the repo's release notes already does this.

Admin: add a gallery

Admin → Subsystems → Galleries (/admin/galleries/).

Click Add Gallery.
Enter label (e.g. "Vacation 2024"), slug auto-derives or specify.
Enter the absolute path on the host (e.g. /srv/photos/vacation-2024).
The directory will be created if it doesn't exist.
Optional description, sort order, active flag.
Save → gallery appears in the public listing.

Admin: manage files

From the gallery list, click the folder icon next to any gallery
to open the file manager. There you can:

See all files as a thumbnail grid (paginated)
Click the × on any tile to delete that file (irreversible — files
are removed from disk)
Drag-and-drop or browse to upload new images. Multi-file uploads
supported. Filenames are sanitized; collisions auto-rename to
name-1.ext, name-2.ext, etc.

Upload is restricted to image extensions; everything else is silently
skipped.

Permissions on disk

Whatever Linux user the gunicorn web service runs as needs read/write
access to the gallery path (read for browsing, write for upload/delete).
On the reference setup the web service runs as anetbbs, so:

sudo chown -R anetbbs:anetbbs /path/to/your/gallery
sudo chmod -R u+rwX /path/to/your/gallery

Galleries can point at directories owned by other users — but uploads
and deletes will fail with permission errors. Read-only galleries are
fine if you set is_active: true and only need browsing.

Terminal access (legacy fallback)

For SSH/Telnet users a standalone bash script is included, installed
by install.sh to the install root itself: $INSTALL_DIR/anet-gallery.sh
(e.g. /opt/anetbbs/anet-gallery.sh). It uses chafa for
Unicode-block art that renders in any terminal, with img2sixel as
an alternative for sixel-capable terminals (SyncTERM, foot, mlterm,
modern xterm).

Quality is much lower than the web viewer (chafa converts pixels to
character cells). For real photographic quality, point users at the
web /gallery/ URL.

Zip-archive entries work here too — the script shells out to python3
to extract the one image inside to a temp file, renders that, then
deletes it.

That install-root path isn't arbitrary: SERVICE_USER is a system
account (useradd -r) with no real home directory, and $INSTALL_DIR
is set as its $HOME field, so this is effectively "the service
user's home." The script survives update.sh's rsync not because it
sits outside the install dir — it doesn't — but because the source
tree has no tracked file at that exact path, so the rsync has nothing
to overwrite it with.