PhotoBook Tools for Scribus

link: https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus

‘PhotoBook Tools’ is a collection of scripts and tricks intended to create photo album pages in a fast and flexible way with Scribus. Please read the ‘Instructions’-file for installation and use!

Summary of workflow:

  1. ‘PhotoBookLayoutMaker’-script generates image frame layouts (you can save them in the Scrapbook for future use).
  2. Insert images in bulk into your image frames.
  3. ‘PhotoBookFillFramesCentered’-script performs automatically a maximal fill of the selected image frames. If needed you can manually adjust.
  4. ‘PhotoBookImageCropResize’-script will crop your images to the image frames and resize them to the desired dpi (reduction of file size).
  5. Edit caption texts (if you have created them in step 1).
  6. Export your photo book to pdf or other formats.

For Scribus 1.5.6 and higher (needs Python 3; tested in Windows 10 and Linux).

9 Likes

Hello, when I run the script PhotoBookLayoutMaker in Scribus 1.5.7 (AppImage for Linux), I get this message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 11, in
File “”, line 440, in
File “”, line 430, in main
File “”, line 279, in init
IndexError: list index out of range

Edit. Some markup problems with the error msg, see screenshot below.

When I run the same script in Scribus 1.5.5 (normal install, so no AppImage), this msg shows up:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 10, in
File “/usr/share/scribus/scripts/PhotoBookLayoutMaker.py”, line 20, in
from configparser import ConfigParser
ImportError: No module named configparser

So I installed the package python-configparser, but then it says in v1.5.5 “this script runs only with Python 3”, while v1.5.7 gives the same error as above.

Edit2. Output of python3 -V is Python 3.8.10.

Scriptfout_001

Hi Paul,
I forgot to add the configuration file ‘PhotoBookLayoutMaker.cfg’ on my PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus - repo. I apologyse for this. Meanwhile it is updated. Please download this file and place it in the same directory as the ‘PhotoBookLayoutMaker.py’-script. Then it should work.

Hello @rafferty , that’s already much better! Now I can run the first script to make a template and insert some photos, then the second to center them but the third one gives an error. I did a
python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow
but when I run that script, I get the following msg.

Script failed_001

Must be something on my machine (I’m not a Python expert), I’ll check that tomorrow.

Your script seems to be very handy, I often print photos using Scribus, so this is something I can use very well. Once that pillow thing is resolved, I’ll have a closer look of the possibilities of your scripts.

Thanks in advance for your work!

Regards, Paul.

Hi Paul,

I am not an expert neither, but it works for me in Ubuntu Focal with scribus-ng version 1.5.6.1-0ubuntu20.04~ppa0 from PPA for Scribus friends : “Scribus” team, which uses Python 3.8.
PIL directory is located in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/PIL and Scribus NG recognizes it without problems.

Hope this helps.

this is great @rafferty ! I have been keeping on hold my Scribus projects – basically simple photobooks intended to be printed via Blurb – because I was finding difficult to manage my hybrid darktable/scribus workflow. You’re giving me additional motivation to get back at it!

BTW, have you ever considered the problem of generating pdf according to Blurb-approved layouts/formats?

@aadm : I used CEWE software in the past (jpg import per page). Now with these Scribus scripts I generate PDF.

Hi,
I downloaded this software to create photo book for my photographs. When I tried to run i got this message.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 8, in
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Scribus 1.4.8\share\scripts\PhotoBookLayoutMaker.py”, line 20, in
from configparser import ConfigParser
ImportError: No module named configparser

Anything I missed while installing?

Thanks

Hi Vasudeva,
As stated in the first post above, you need Scribus version 1.5.6 or above for these scripts (then the configparser module will automatically be installed with Scribus installation in folder C:\Program Files\Scribus\python\lib).

Thanks for the quick response.

The mistake was I had downloaded older version of Scribus.

Now it is working

Thanks