pubpics is a program that builds web pages from digital photos. That is, it takes as input a bunch of jpg's from a digital camera and produces nice looking web pages, with index pages containing thumbnails. A thumbnail is a very small version of the picture, just big enough that you can recognize the contents of the picture. The original digital pictures are resized into three sets of pictures, allowing viewers to sequentially or randomly browse in any size. The largest images can optionally have a copyright notice added to them.

You use pubpics by starting with a directory contains digital pictures you want to convert into web pages. In the simplest form, you call pubpics this way:

 pubpics source-directory destination-directory

After completion, destination-directory will contain an index.htm that can be viewed with any web browser.

Each index page consists of a set of thumbnails. You can view the picture linked to the thumbnail by clicking on it. The index pages point to picture pages.

Each index page contains navigation links to previous and subsequent index pages. Each picture page contains navigation links to previous and subsquent pictures pages and to the index page containing the thumbnail for this picture. Each picture page also contains a navigation link to the index page of a different size.

Consider a set of web pages made from three digital pictures, a.jpg, b.jpg and c.jpg. Think of the pictures as occupying cells of a spreadsheet:

   small   a.jpg | b.jpg | c.jpg
           ---------------------
   medium  a.jpg | b.jpg | c.jpg
           ---------------------
   large   a.jpg | b.jpg | c.jpg

The small row consists of the smallest images, better viewed on a laptop, for example. The medium row consists of the middle sized images, and the large row contains the largest images. Each cell is linked to the cell to the left and/or right, and top and/or bottom.