Time lapse web interface

Question

Hello and thanks in advance for looking at my problem. I'm trying to create a web interface for a time lapse project I'm doing right now, but I don't know exactly where to start with this.

What I have

• A website, obviously;
• A lot of pictures, made every 15 minutes;
• Stored in folders (/mm-yy), saved as dd-mm-yy_hhmm.jpg.

What I'm looking for

• I want to be able to select a date with a datepicker, which returns all the pictures taken on that particular day so I can show only those pictures on the site.

I've been searching around but I have troubles finding out what the best solution is and where to start. I don't have a lot of experience with JavaScript. I thought maybe create a JSON-file with all the images (regenerated every 15 minutes) and use that in some way with a datepicker?

Any ideas, tips and/or tricks?

Answer 1

There are numerous ways to approach this but since you tagged php my first impulse would be something akin to:

1. Walk the directory tree to find all represented months
2. For a given month build your date list using regex - this will let you pull out the date matches you need
3. Create your date picker using one of the many, many javascript options

IIWM I wouldn't mess about with a separate file the gets regenerated. Do your population when the page opens.