After using Extreme Thumbnail Generator, I have some thoughts and observations …
I decided to try with images of movie posters that were in folders with other files. The images were the names of the movies and the year it was made. Therefore, the result gallery shows the movie poster and the name of the movie. Movie posters are more portrait oriented, so some adjustments had to be made. Also, some movie names contain accented characters, and some movie names are very long. These peculiarities caused some glitches while using this software.
There are several steps to create the thumbnail HTML pages. Initially, a set of files are added, and at the end, the “Generate” step creates the HTML files in a user chosen destination folder. In between several options are available to the user to manipulate what the final pages and images will look like. By default, the generate process also makes a copy of the original image files as thumbnails, and another one as a version that can be displayed individually on a single page. The names of these two image folders can be specified by the user, with the default being “thumbs” and “images” (appropriate enough).
The most common usage would be to generate index pages that show several images as thumbnails and individual pages that show a single image in a larger size. There are several templates to choose from, and the user can manipulate a template, and even save it as a new name so as not to alter the original.
Even after generating a set of output pages, the user can still refine the original image list, and then re-generate a new set of output pages.
After the process of creating the image list is complete, there are several things you can do to the list. The program has multiple options to manipulate the image list as buttons, such as change the order (up or down in the list), add or remove, rotate, or apply effects.
The Clear list button removes all files from the list but not from the chosen output folder files once they have been created by the program. You must do that manually if you do not wish to have them in your output folders any longer.
It is very important to understand how two common things you can do to the list work. You can remove items from the list, and you can rename a file in the list. These two work very differently in regards to the original files, and it can be concerning until you understand what each operation does.
The user can rename any item in the list using the F2 (standard rename function) key. It is important to understand that the rename affects the original image file on the hard drive (not the copy of the image in the thumbs or image folder). If the original filename is depended on by other programs or webpages, keep in mind that the rename may prevent other things from working. In my case, once I understood the original file was being renamed, I proceeded very carefully. If you have already generated pages, they are not affected since they use the original name, which is the same as in the images folder. To use the renamed file name, you need to re-generate the output pages again. Of course, doing so, the file with the original name is still in the images folder and thumbnails folder. You will need to manually remove those files since they are no longer needed.
The user can also remove any selected file(s) from the list using the button function or the Delete command (Ctrl+D). The entry is removed from the list only (thankfully this does not remove the original file from the hard drive). It is good that it does not delete your original files, but unfortunate that it does not remove files it copied to the image and thumbs directory once they have been created by the program. Those files are now pretty much garbage mixed in with files you want to keep. You can manually do the cleanup, but make sure you do not remove files you intend to use.
The user must not alter the image file copies without understanding the consequences. Deleting any of those files can affect the final result, since the program does not check to see that they are no longer available when re-generating index files and individual pages that show a single image.
The program does recognize that the user has added or altered the items in the image list, so in the re-generate step, the program has defaults set intended to prevent unnecessary work. The user also can override the default choice in order to re-generate all images, all thumbnails, and all output files.
Each time a generation of pages is made, any old pages are overwritten automatically. After a set of pages has been created, if the list of images grows, the next generation will create more image pages, and possibly more index pages. If the image list is shortened however, the next generation will create fewer image pages (and possibly fewer index pages). In this case, pages at the end of the list may be for a previous but larger image list. In that case, these extra pages are now garbage that you no longer need. Looking at the file modified timestamp will allow the user to manually delete these un-needed pages. The same manual cleanup goes for any images that are created in the images directory and also the thumbs directory. It would be nice if the program had an option to remove any un-needed images and pages to match the current image list.
If the original source folder has new entries, you may wish to re-generate a new set of pages in order to include the new entries. Adding the same starting folder of images a second time will create two sets of files in the image list. It would be nice to have an option to Remove duplicates. In this case, it might be better to clear the entire list, and let the program recreate a new list. By the way, when generating the output pages, the second occurrence of a file name causes a prompt that allows the user to chose to include it a second time or skip the file.
Using the Add Individual Image option, the user can browser to a folder on their hard drive(s). If there are images files in the folder, they are displayed in the list. A drop-down list default is “All Image files” however the user can use the drop-down list to select JPEG, GIF, or PNG files only, which will filter out the others. You cannot add anything other than image files since the purpose of the program is for images only.
Therefore …
It is interesting that a list of recognized file types of images is included in the Help text, however there is a case where the list is totally ignored.
Unfortunately, when you “Add Folder” this program adds ALL file types found in the starting and any subfolder. The resultant list can contain many types of files that are not wanted in the list.
For my first use, I used the Add Folder, which added many files that are not images, so obviously I did not want them in the final list. Now I needed to weed most of the entries out of the list.
By using Sort button, the resultant list can be trimmed, such as sort by file size. Surprisingly, there is no sort by file extension. At least that would allow easier selecting of file types that are not wanted in the final set.
The sort list is only available as part of the button options. You cannot select a column heading to do sorts, which be a nice addition.
Of course, even better would be to add images only.
IMAGE FILE TYPES AND SIZES
The program creates a copy of the original file for thumbnails and a copy to be displayed as the larger image for the individual pages. The size of the thumbnail created can be set by the user. The default is a landscape oriented image, usually 150 wide by 120 tall. The user can switch these if the images are portrait oriented, also the sizes can be changed to any size preferred. The sizes are in pixels. The sizes cannot be specified as a percentage of a container.
Also, if your original files are larger than what you would like for the individual pages, you can use the Resize option in the Options | Images tab. You can specify a maximum width and height to use. The section is labeled “Resize original images” but it does not actually change your original files. The program merely looks at your original files, and if any are larger than your specified size, it will create a smaller one to go into the “images” folder it uses for the webpages it creates. If the source image files are smaller than your specified size, they will be copied as is to the final images folder. Therefore, the end result pages may have images that are smaller than others. You are only assured that the largest will be at the sizes you specified. To ensure all images are the same size, the user would need to select a file size that is equal to the smaller file in the original location. It would be nice if the files created for display could be enlarged as well. This would not be a bad thing as long as the enlargement is not so much that the original image looks bad.
Regardless of file type started with (PNG, GIF, or JPEG), the copies are always created as JPEG files. In many cases, a PNG file would look better, but unfortunately, the user cannot specify the type of file to create.
The program allows the user to specify the final file sizes, but it does not allow the user to specify a width to use for the output filename itself. In my case, I had some images with very long names, and the result index pages were much wider for the column that had longer file names to display.
META DATA
If the user chooses to add Meta tag data, there is an option to do so. The initial value of the checkboxes are blank. By checking the checkbox, the user can specify data that will appear in the header such as Author, Copyright, keywords, description, and character set. The data seems to be oriented more to the template in use at the time. If the template is edited, the Meta tag checkboxes become blank again, and the data entered is lost. Likewise, if a different template is selected, the fields go blank again. When changing to a different template, the user is not necessarily changing the list of image files, so why not keep the original META data? It would be desirable to retain the data for the project so that it does not need to be typed in again over and over.
For the meta tag for description, there is an option to add the break () tag at the end of each line. The program recommends this if the user adds their own text, however it does not recommend if the user pastes HTML code in the edit field (to avoid unwanted tags). The first problem with this is that tags (with the ending slash) are for XML/XHTML (not HTML; <br> is HTML). The second problem with this is that the description field should not have any break tags of any type because the description is for the HEAD section; break tags are for the BODY section. Keep in mind that browsers do not attempt to point out mistakes, otherwise, users would start using another browser; instead, browsers will attempt to do what the author intended, be it right or wrong; placing break tags in the head section is incorrect regardless if the browser starts a new line or not. Also, the description should be less than 160 anyway (shoot for around 150 characters).
Selecting a character set for the META data should be done with some understanding of what is produced, otherwise a filename may not display properly. For example, using the (Unicode)UTF-8 character set, filenames containing e that has the acute accent mark will display as a question mark in the final page when displayed by the browser. In these cases, the character to display should be replaced with the “é” to render correctly to the user. The è” should be used for e with the grave accent mark (as well as many other substitutions). The user does have other Unicode options; using the character set for Unicode only will leave the filenames as they are but at least they will display properly. It would be nice if the program took care of conversions for the pages generated, and/or inform the user of a better choice to use when characters are found that will not render with the chosen character set.
When the generating process completed, a dialog was displayed to tell how to view the gallery in the default browser or to view the result through Windows Explorer, however the text was cut off at the end for both the location, and the description text:
All gallery files were saved to:
G:\htdocs\www\_11\gallery101\photos\TBlackWithGreyFra
Please click the [ View ] button to view the gallery in your
default browser or click [ Open gallery folder ] button to
to what??
If the “saved to” location is short enough to not be cut off, then the next chunk of text starts up a line, and as a result the final line says now says:
view generated files.
So, it looks like if the saved to location is longer than what the program is expecting, it affects the bottom part of the dialog.
There was an option to not show this dialog again (Don’t show this notification again), and the default was unchecked. Even though I left the box unchecked, the next time I re-generated the pages, the dialog was not shown. I would expect this if I chose to check the “Don’t show this notification again” box, but it did not show again until I selected a different template. A new template did cause the dialog to show up again, but only once for that template. Apparently, even though the box is unchecked, the program operates as if the box is checked.
VALID HTML
My interest was in creating HTML output that would validate through the Web Consortium tests. The template “Thumbnails only (Rounded Black box)” was selected as my first choice. I found that the output created was based on HTML 4.01 and loose coding (DOCTYPE), however some parts generated were for XHTML instead. Webpages should never mix code from multiple standards. I needed to modify the template to create output that was closer to what I wanted.
Initially, I chose to leave the HTML generated at the 4.01 level, and fix the incorrect parts. By editing the templates, some things can be changed.
I added a lang=”en=US” to the <html> tag.
I had to remove the ending slash in the template for the CSS link style sheet line to get the head to validate (change XHTML to HTML).
For parts of the generated pages, such as the header, footer, and title areas, there are several bits of additional data that can be inserted. For example, [#image.width#]x[#image.height#] can be inserted. The output will have the actual value of the image width and height displayed in the location the inserted data is found by the program.
Oddly, in some cases, the inserted data was not processed. For example, inserting [#thumbspage.header#] caused the output on the final pages to have the string [#thumbspage.header#] displayed without any changes. I found the same for [#thumbspage.footer#]. Not sure why some inserted data is processed and others not.
Even though the main purpose of the program is to generate pages that show images, the generated HTML files do not include width and height as part of the img tag for images in the list. Specifying the width and height is highly suggested for valid HTML output. I was able to modify the template, and added the width and height to the corner images, but for the section that shows the gallery images, there does not seem to be a place where the user has control over what is generated; the img tag code seems to be generated by the program (cannot be edited by the user in a template). The width and height of the images is known since the value can be inserted in various places, just not in the img tag for the generated pages (as far as I can tell).
If the staring index page needs to display more than one page to show all of the thumbnails, a graphic right pointing arrow is shown at the bottom to advance a page and to advance to the last page. Oddly, for the “Thumbnails only (Rounded Black box)” template, the graphic for advancing to the next page looks nearly identical to the graphic for going to the last page. After advancing a page, the bottom graphic shows that the left point arrow used for the previous and very first page are also nearly identical. The user must keep in mind the position of the graphic to understand its use, and holding the mouse pointer over the image will display the image title for the image, which shows whether the image is for next or last, and previous or first.
Other templates use text instead of graphics for the next, previous, and other choices. It is a good idea to experiment around with different templates to see the variety of styles of pages generated. All seem to be from a time in the past when HTML 4 was in use, but now these templates seem a bit outdated.
After creating HTML 4.01 pages that validate, I wanted to create XHTML 1.1 page that validate at the strict level, however due to expected problems caused by the limits the program imposed, I did not try.
There are many other options that I did not mention because they seemed to perform as expected. It is worth spending some time to see the results this program can produce.
A conclusion thus far:
This program can create something that you may wish to edit to fine-tune for the final results. Hopefully, an updated version of the program will be an improvement. This program has more potential than many others I have encountered. I hope we can see a future version offered here for more testing.