*** ThumbIndex: Create a thumbnail index. *** ThumbIndex ver 1.4 Welcome to ThumbIndex ver 1.4 Using a simple step-by-step procedure, ThumbIndex makes it easy to 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. ____________________________________________________________________________ Installation To install Thumb-Index 1) To install as a SREhttp/2 addon: a) Unzip the distribution file to an empty temporary directory b) Run the INSTALL.CMD program You can then request /SRE2K/SREHTTP2/APPS/THUMINDX.HTM -- THUMINDX.HTM leads you to a a step-by-step set of forms for creating thumbnails, and for creating web-accesible indices to these thumbnails. , which provides a front-end to the THUMINDX.CMD addon. After installing you can delete the contents of this temporary directory. 2) To run as a standalone program a) Create a directory that will contain the ThumbIndex files (say, D:\THUMINDX). b) Unzip the distribution file to this "Thumb-Index" directory. c) Create a THUMCASH directory under this ThumbIndex directory (say; D:\THUMINDX\THUMCASH) Alternatively, you can use specify a NOT_HTTP=2 parameter (in the batch file) -- see THUMINDX.TXT for the details. You can then run THUMINDX.CMD from an OS/2 command line prompt. In either case, * You might want to copy the .EXE files to a directory in your OS/2 PATH (say, c:\os2\apps), and the .DLL files to a directory in your OS/2 LIBPATH (say, c:\os2\dll. * THUMINDX.CMD contains several user configurable parameters. Most of the time you don't need to modify them, but if you intend to use THUMINDX.CMD both as an SREhttp/2 addon and as a standalone utility, you SHOULD set the value of the THUMBNAIL_DIR parameter. ____________________________________________________________________________ How it works ThumbIndex creates thumbnails in several ways: 1. If you have GIF files, thumbnails will be created on the fly 2. 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). 3. 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 (http://www.pmview.com). PMVIEW can quickly create these thumbnails for all images in a directory. ____________________________________________________________________________ Using ThumbIndex When used as an SREhttp/2 addon, creation of a thumbnail index is a several step process: 1. 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. 2. Add comments (optional). Add text comments describing your images. These complement the thumbnail images. This step is optional. 3. 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. When used as a standalone utility, Thumb-Index requires an input file. The syntax is described at length in THUMINDX.TXT. Hints * You can provide one parameter on the command line: the name of a 'ThumbIndex command file'. If you provide no parameters, then you will be asked for the name of a ThumbIndex command file. For example: x:\ThumIndx>thumindx thum1.in * To save status messages to an output file, use x:\ThumIndx>thumindx thum1.in > results.out * Note that using a command line parameter of ? will give you some on-line help. ____________________________________________________________________________ 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 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.