Git Gallery

I’ve been quiet for a while because I fell into the tooling trap. I wanted to make more digital art, but instead I built a tool to help with making digital art. I wasn’t satisfied with my workflow for creating and keeping track of the digital sketches I was creating, so I built Git Gallery. Git Gallery is a tool that lets you build a visual gallery of your work based on Git commits that you find interesting.

I’ve found that creating digital art is quite different than most other software development. Usually when creating software the aim is to make things ‘better’. Features are added and things generally improve from one commit to the next. With art this isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes while working towards some visual goal there are serendipitous discoveries along the way, inspirations for other paths to take and explorations to make. Often I want to explore the parameter space of the work, changing values, colours, functions, etc. None of this is predictable or linear, but Git only makes it easy to see the latest version of the code and hides all the rest. Git Gallery addresses this by letting you create pages that preserve these interesting versions of the work.

The workflow is that you still use Git as you normally would (adding, committing, branching, etc.) but when you want to record your work, you create a ‘Page’ in Git Gallery. You can add images to the page or if your work is web-based you can run it live from the repo. Everything is stored in a .gitGallery directory next to the .git repository, so you can view and edit things using the file system or edit the pages through the app in the browser.

Details on how to install and run the tool are on the Github page: https://github.com/thatcort/git-gallery

At this point the tool is very fresh and should be considered alpha quality, but I’m hoping by scratching my itch I have made something useful to others as well. Feedback, suggestions and pull requests are very welcome!