image viewing/thumbnailing program

Crappopotamus

Golden Member
Oct 1, 2002
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im a yearbook editor at school, and we're going to put out a cd with all the pictures of camp. there are going to be tons of these pics, and not everyone has winxp w/ thumbnails. its going to be overwhelming for those without thumbs, so im wondering what the best way to do this is. anyone have experience in something like this?

maybe we could include a program that will thumbnail the pics and make them easy to browse through? or maybe something like the photoshop photogallery wizard. only problem is that a lot of these pics are really high res, and photoshop will shrink em down.
 

Mitzi

Diamond Member
Aug 22, 2001
3,775
1
76
IrfanView is an excellent viewer application (freeware).

I use GallMage to automatically create thumbnails for all my web based galleries (though you need Java to run it). It's a very simple application which will generate a thumbnail for every image file in a specified directory.

 

Lint21

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
508
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I would not include a program. You have a bunch of potential problems to deal with then. Is it legal to redictribute the software? It isn't always, and while no one would care if it was just you giving it to a friend, this is a school project, which makes it more serious. Also, you are assuming that everyone who receives the CD will be be capable of imstalling a program, and that they have a PC, not a Mac. It's an awful lot to ask people to do just to view a CD of pictures.

I would do something more universal. Create HTML pages with thumbnail galleries. The thumbnails link to the pictures, and the pages link to each other. Everyone has a web browser on their machine, PC or Mac, and the images will be displayed in the browser. There are a bunch of programs that would create HTML galleries quickly and easily, just check www.download.com, or ask around here. I would also look into creating an autorun.inf that would launch the first HTML page when the CD is loaded (you'd be surprised how many people are terrified of opening a file browser).
 

Rottie

Diamond Member
Feb 10, 2002
4,795
2
81
being an digital artist I used shareware version of Graphic Workshop Professional 2.0 It allows you to view any kind of format, AVI, PICT, GIF, JPG, TIFF, PSD, and many more..also allows you to batch anything you like...even crop pic...Good Thumbnail.
 

igowerf

Diamond Member
Jun 27, 2000
7,697
1
76
Make an HTML gallery with large previews (around 640x480) so people can quickly cycle through pictures and view them, but also make the pictures viewable so they open up the full resolution picture. It'd be better to have "shrunken" 800 or 640 res pictures just so they're more accessible.