command or script to make thumbnails

[keevill]

Not sure if this is really a htaccess topic but here goes.

Currently on my website apache server we have a folder into which we upload a pile of high resolution pictures for our agents worldwide to download.
A htaccess file is used to do two things:
To control access - login / password
To enable a listing of the pictures since there is no index file - using the Options -Indexes   switch

I want to enable users to see a thumbnail of each picture so they can decide whether to download without having to open the high resolution file first.

Currently, it shows an icon and name of an image but no thumbnail.
Can someone suggest a quick easy way to do this perhaps using a script or something?
The perfect solution would be to stick in a script which automatically makes a thumbnail and positions it to the left of the link of the high resolution file.

[jdMorgan]

Make an index page (static HTML or dynamic PHP) that links to the big images using the thumbnail images, and then either create and upload those thumbnails or use an image-processing script to do it on the server (save and/or cache the thumbnails to avoid having to re-generate them every time the pages is loaded!)

There are many PHP scripts and libraries that you could use to do this, but I'm not really up to speed on that subject. imagemagick comes to mind.

Jim