ThumbIndex
Welcome to ThumbIndex: a web based utility that makes it easy
to create a thumbnail index.
By following the several steps (indicated on the lefthand side frame),
you can easily create a thumbnail index of your images (by image,
we mean any graphic, including art work and photos).
What is a thumbnail index?
A thumbnail is a small picture that looks like a larger image.
A thumbnail index is a WWW accessible file (an HTML file)
that contains a series of links to files in a selected (WWW accessible)
directory; with each link associated with the appropriate thumbnail.
With a thumbnail index, it's easier for people to choose
which image they want to see -- since even a small picture is worth a
thousand words.
ThumbIndex creates thumbnails in several ways:
- If you have GIF files, thumbnails will be created on the fly
- For JPEG, TIFF, BMP, and several other kinds of files (unfortunately,
this does not include PNG files), thumbnails will
be created on the fly (albeit more slowly then for GIF files).
- For all kinds of graphic files, if a thumbnail is contained in the file's
extended attributes, it will be used. Of course, this means that you need some
means of creating this thumbnail in the extended attribute.
The easiest way to do that is to use PMVIEW.
PMVIEW can quickly create these thumbnails for all images in a directory.
When you are ready to start, just hit the #1 checkbox (create thumbnails)
in the frame on screen left.
How it works
Creation of a thumbnail index is a several step process:
- Create the thumbnails. You choose a (WWW accessible) directory, and ThumbIndex
will create the thumbnails (or pull them out of the extended attributes)
and store them on your hard drive.
This step also generates a ThumbIndex
database, which contains information on these thumbnails.
Both the thumbnail images, and the thumbindex database, are stored
in a special thumbnail cache directory.
- Add comments (optional). Add text comments describing your images.
These complement the thumbnail images. This step is optional.
- Create HTML files containing the thumbnail index.
Using the results of steps 1 and 2, two HTML documents are created.
The first contains a clientside image map (constructed from the thumbnails)
that can be used to retrieve an image. The second is a simple list that
displays each thumbnail, and with each thumbnail linked to it's corresponding image.
These will be written to the directory you chose in step 1.
Summarizing
The idea is simple: if you have images on a WWW accessible computer (that is, on
an http server), and you want to make them available to the world (or some fraction of the
world)... then all you
have to do is point "the world" to a thumbnail index. ThumbIndex makes
this process easy!
Notes
Running ThumbIndex
ThumbIndex is designed to run as an addon for the SRE-http web server for OS/2.
If you are not using SRE-http, you can also run ThumbIndex as a standalone program --
path to the directory containing THUMINDX.CMD, and
enter THUMINDX ? at an OS/2 command prompt for the details.
Creating snapshots
In addition to creating thumbnails, ThumbIndex can also create snapshots.
Snapshots are VGA quality (640x480, highly compressed JPEG) images.
They are useful when the underlying images are large (say, 1600x1200) -- you
can let the viewer quickly download the small snapshot file, and
then decide whether or not to download the larger underlying image.
To create snapshots, your images must be on a non-FAT drive.
A SNPS subdirectory is created under the image directory. and
it is filled with filenames that look like SNP_00000124.JPG.
An alternative
For an alternative method of making thumbnails, you
can try
the ThumbSRE/WWWThumb thumbnail creator