Preserved Topic: Lots of pictures, please help

Hi

I'm doing a homepage on which I shall publish about 400+ pictures. I will have to do thumbnails for them and make them to open in a new window when clicked on. I'm currently using Photoshop 6.01 together with Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0. I wonder if anyone could help me with how I could do this automated. It would take weeks to do it manually.

I might add that all the pictures are named systematically.

Thank you very much!
Axel



[This message has been edited by axe (edited 11-24-2001).]

In PS:
File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery

I'm not sure, but I think you will have to batch process the images into thumbnails first (in a separate dir of course), then do something creative with Web Photo Gallery for relative links. Then grab the tables and drop them into a template. Then do a global search/replace to add your JS in the anchors.

Ahh.. bit vague, isn't it?

Just ran a quick test. PS did some things that I don't care for. Sure, it thumbnailed for me and dumped them into a subdir, but it also made another dir and copied the originals as well. Not the greatest amount of options for the thumnailing, and no options for setting up relative links. Boo hiss

Maybe you can find a DW extension with a little more control than just using PS. Then you can use PS *just* for the thumbnailing.

I recommend Thumbnailer. I used it a long time ago just to see and I was very impressed with it's flexibility. If I remember correctly, ThumbsPlus does an equally impressive job.

Both progs can be a bit confusing at first, but once you get the hang of them, they are very nice for such tasks. Then it's just a matter of templating and code cleanup.




[This message has been edited by warjournal (edited 11-24-2001).]

Don't know anything about thumbnailer, but Thumbsplus is an absolutely *excellent* program on many levels, far more than just creating thumbnils tto use...

for 400+ images, I'd accept some compromise. Sheesh. Thassa lotta stuff!

No way would I use anything but PS Web Photo Gallery. I've found it pretty flexible in terms of being able to set thumbnail size and number per page, larger view size, and best of all - you don't have to do a thing but get it started! You walk away and when you come back it's done. How can you beat that????

Download Martin Evening's tutorial on customizing the Web Photogallery: http://www.peimag.com/Tutorials/2001_1/2001_1.htm

Pretty slick. PS uses templates to create the pages; these templates can be customized (to make them look like the rest of your site for instance). Pretty slick. I've done it, and it's cool.


Other alternative is to poke around the Server-Side Scripting forum right here at Ozone for some leads on using PHP to create photo galleries. I have not done this personally, so can't offer anything more than a lead.

But I do use Web Photo Gallery regularly to give a client an easy means of browsing the contents to a digital shoot - burn the gallery to disk right along with the images. Might not be all that sophisticated, but hey - it works.

400 images. Man - Hope your viewers are patient. Do you have any means for indexing? If the viewer is looking for something, is there any way for them to find it without wading thru 400 images?

[This message has been edited by Steve (edited 11-25-2001).]

Since client side programs have been covered in posts from above, I'll just mention one server-side script that can also make your life easier with all those images...

IDS (Image Display System) - a CGI written in Perl that interactively generates a photo album website.

More similar server-side scripts can be found at the following locations:

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Image_Galleries/
http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/Image_Galleries/

In PS, you could write an action, then create a droplet for it, then just drop the files you want resized... I think