If, as in my case, you would like to load the images from a local folder on your own machine, then there is a simple way to do it with a very short Windows batch file. This uses the ability to send the output of any command to a file using > (to overwrite a file) and >> (to append to a file).
Potentially, you could output a list of filenames to a plain text file like this:
dir /B > filenames.txt
However, reading in a text file requires more faffing around, so I output a javascript file instead, which can then be loaded in your to create a global variable with all the filenames in it.
echo var g_FOLDER_CONTENTS = mlString(function() { /*! > folder_contents.js
dir /B images >> folder_contents.js
echo */}); >> folder_contents.js
The reason for the weird function with comment inside notation is to get around the limitation on multi-line strings in Javascript. The output of the dir command cannot be formatted to write a correct string, so I found a workaround here.
function mlString(f) {
return f.toString().
replace(/^[^\/]+\/\*!?/, '').
replace(/\*\/[^\/]+$/, '');
}
Add this in your main code before the generated javascript file is run, and then you will have a global variable called g_FOLDER_CONTENTS, which is a string containing the output from the dir command. This can then be tokenized and you'll have a list of filenames, with which you can do what you like.
var filenames = g_FOLDER_CONTENTS.match(/\S+/g);
Here's an example of it all put together: image_loader.zip
In the example, run.bat generates the Javascript file and opens index.html, so you needn't open index.html yourself.
NOTE: .bat is an executable type in Windows, so open them in a text editor before running if you are downloading from some random internet link like this one.
If you are running Linux or OSX, you can probably do something similar to the batch file and produce a correctly formatted javascript string without any of the mlString faff.