Features¶

SHIS is built with speed in mind. Here are some features which help.

Friendly syntax
Instant serving
Multiprocessing support
Efficient resumes
Create thumbnails and previews
Minimal dependencies
Pagination support
Preserve EXIF orientation
Determines public IP
Selection support
Watch filesystem for changes
Group items together

Friendly syntax ¶

SHIS is meant to be a drop in replacement for http.server, so it’s easier for your brain (and your hands) to remember it’s usage. SHIS follows the same invocation as http.server.

SHIS starts serving webpages even before the thumbnails can be created. This means that you can start browsing the website for images while SHIS is busy creating thumbnails. This is incredibly useful for large directories where processing thumbnails can take a long time.

Multiprocessing support ¶

SHIS uses multiprocessing to take advantage of all cores available on the system. This means that multiple thumbnails can be generated paralelly, which significantly speeds up the entire process.

Efficient resumes ¶

When SHIS is run for the first time, it creates thumbnails for every image in the directory. However, when the next time SHIS is run, it only creates thumbnails for files which have changed. In case SHIS was interrupted in between, it will only create thumbnails for images which haven’t been processed. This means subsequent runs will be significantly faster.

Create thumbnails and previews ¶

SHIS can create both, small size thumbnails and large size previews. This means one can quickly skim through large size previews instead of waiting for the original full size image to load in the browser. To enable large size previews, run SHIS with the --previews flag. SHIS also lets you customize the size of the generated thumbnails and previews using the --thumb-size and --preview-size flags.

Minimal dependencies ¶

SHIS does not depend on a lot of third party modules. It uses Pillow (PIL) to create thumbnails, Jinja2 as the templating language to create HTML pages, and tqdm to display clean progress bars. It uses the built in HTTP Server included with python to serve webpages.

Pagination support ¶

SHIS was designed keeping in mind hundreds (or even thousands) of images per directory. With such quantity, it becomes necessary to split images across multiple pages. SHIS automatically does that for you. By default, SHIS only displays up to 200 items per page. You can customize This using the --pagination flag.

Preserve EXIF orientation ¶

More often than not, the correct orientation of an image is stored in its EXIF data. SHIS will honor the EXIF orientation (if present) in an image and rotate it accordingly. This means you no longer have to worry about rotating images anymore.

Determines public IP ¶

In a scenario where you’re running SHIS on a remove VM such as EC2, it’s helpful to know the public IP of the server. SHIS tries to determine the public IP of your machine, and displays that address whenever possible. This means you no longer have to remember the public IP of your server.

Selection support ¶

SHIS makes it easier to visually filter images by adding a Selection Mode, which can be enabled using the -s or --selection flags. After you enable selection mode, you can select images on the website the same way you’d do in a file explorer. Once you have selected images, click Copy on the top right of the page, and all file names will be copied to a clipboard. You can then paste these file names in a text file or a terminal, and use the filtered file names to move or delete files. As an example, if you paste all file names to files.txt and you want to copy those files to another folder, you can simply use cat files.txt | xargs -i cp src/{} dest/ on a unix based system.

Watch filesystem for changes ¶

SHIS can continously scan the filesystem for any changes and automatically update the contents of the website. To enable this functionality, simply use the -w or the --watch flags. By default, SHIS will scan the filesystem for changes every 30 seconds. You can specify the scanning interval (in seconds) right after the watch flag. For example, -w 15 sets the watch interval as 15 seconds.

Group items together ¶

As a visual aid, SHIS can insert newlines at specified intervals so images can be grouped together, and every nth image appears at the same position on the screen. To use this feature, use the -g or the --group flag. The default behaviour is not to group any items together.