thumbnail photos

[Bubzeebub]

How do you create thumbnail photos? Do you need any software to do it or is it just a link to an image? I have limited area in which to work with on a website and would like to use thumbnails instead of having a bunch of larger images. How would I set that up?

[lZakl]

I have never had the need to create masses of thumbs, but by googling "create thumbnails" (WITH QUOTES), I came up with at least 7 viable, different ways of doing what you are trying to do. Anything from Frontpage, to other 3rd party plugins & programs, plus there looks like ways to do it with PHP also by the look of things.

[tbear]

There are various programmes around that will convert your images to thumbnails and rename them for you. Just search thumbnails on your favourite SE.....

[emac]

Photoshop - file - automate

If you have photoshop, I can tell you ho to do it.

it is easy.

[Michael Weir]

you can create midget versions in photoshop, or when coding the image into your site you can change the parameters of the image.

<img src="myimage.jpg" width="25" height="25"></img>

[Bubzeebub]

Much thanks to you all!

[limbo]

Using a browser to resize images is not very good practice and if I were you I'd try to avoid that method. Search for: Batch Processing - very powerful particularly if you have Photoshop.

[BwanaZulia]

I use plugin for my application server (Zope) that allows me to upload images and it creates as many different sizes and versions of thumbnails automatically.

Before I upload them, I put them through a batch process as a saved action in Photoshop to bring them down to 600 x 800 and optimized for the web (JPG Medium, I think). It will aslo save them with web friendly filenames.

BZ

[Michael Weir]

I don't see why using the browser to resize an image could be a bad practice. If the images are all optimized for the web, which they should be if you are the lowliest of low web designers, having the browser resize them is not a problem.

[smokeyb]

Surely using a browser to resize them would mean pointing to the larger file? My TNs are 1kb and the images (500x500px) are 20kb. Am I missing something?

[lZakl]

If the images are all optimized for the web, which they should be if you are the lowliest of low web designers

I disagree. If you have 20 100kb files, granted the images could be optimized for web, but your naivety lies in the fact that just 20 100kb files would be 2mb worth of download time just to SEE the thumbs. That’d suck. At a FULL 56K that would take your viewers almost a minute to download. Thumbs would be about 5-10k... at 10k, 20 of them would take about 5 seconds to download. “Even the lowliest of web designers should know that the max page download page-size should be between 35-80K... max...”

I guess you don’t care about the person on the other end, and keeping them coming back to your site?

[smokeyb]

Or even between 15 to 40kb

[smokeyb]

Just for the record, a Kilobit (56k) is not a Kilobyte. You get about 1mb per 5 minutes from a 56k modem, so that would be 10 minutes for 2mb of files.

[limbo]

Using browser resize an image is bad practice

I should have explained that further (this is opionion). Letting the browser compress your image defeats the purpose of thumnails. They are supposed to be quick to download so the user gets to choose whether they want to see more. The file size will remain the same if you alter the dimensions.

Also image quality is much diminshed when using browsers to resize an image, this of course will not effect a transparent spacer, but for a quality photo using the browswer just seems lazy. The compression algorythym used by browsers are simple at best. An image editor will allow much greater compression, less visual degredation and you can choose the level of optimisation. Also you can save this as a batch/command set it running and make the tea.

[lZakl]

smokeyb,

Thank you for enlightening me ;0) To be honest, I was unaware, although I thought the numbers sounded too low... It just further proves the point that, on a page with multiple photos, thumbs are a good thing

I have just learned to start using ImageMagick (for php enabled sites) btw, works wonderfully! Take a little longer to load than normal thumbs, but REALLY dynamic in allowing me to choose the photos I want to make thumbs out of.

[smokeyb]

Thanks for clearing that up limbo. I had/have no plans of ever trying that method, but I am better informed as to why not. It was always self evident by the existence of the concept of thumbnails, as you pointed out, and explains why we all have that gut feeling not to do it.
I had a post some time ago on page filesize, and learned then that you lose people after 8 seconds (that's about 40kB to a 56k modem user), so now my thumbnails never reach 2kB, and that browser method should be given a wide berth...

[mahlon]

We use a Photoshop Action Script here, for every image on the site, we have it set to save a thumbnail, regular size and a hi-res image while optimizing the file size.

[twist]

Fireworks also has batch processing.