ThumbIndex

Description
ThumbIndex creates, and delivers, thumbnails of images.

When offering a list of files for downloading over the WWW, it's often convenient to graphically illustrate the contents of the file by displaying a thumbnail (a small GIF image) adjacent to the file name. For example, thumbnails are often miniatures of larger graphics files; or, they can also be the desktop icon associated with a non-graphics file.

ThumbIndex program is designed to create, and deliver, these thumbnails. It's main advantage is ease of use; you can easily create indexes containing thumbnails that point to their underlying image.

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.

ThumbIndex creates thumbnails in several ways:


 * If you have GIF files, thumbnails will be created on the fly
 * 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).
 * 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. PMVIEW can quickly create these thumbnails for all images in a directory.

Note that ThumbIndex can be run as an SRE-http addon, or from the command line. When run as an addon, you can use use THUMINDX.HTM -- it contains a step-by-step set of forms for creating thumbnails, and for creating web-accesible indices to these thumbnails. requires the SRE-http web server for OS/2.

How it works
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.

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!

Running ThumbIndex
ThumbIndex is designed to run as an addon for the SRE-http web server for OS/2. If you are not using SRE-http, you can also run ThumbIndex as a standalone program -- path to the directory containing THUMINDX.CMD, and enter THUMINDX ? at an OS/2 command prompt for the details.

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.

Installing ThumbIndex
To install as an SRE-http addon:


 * Unzip the THUMINDX zip file to an empty temporary directory.
 * Run the INSTALL program.
 * Assuming that SRE-http is running, request THUMINDX.HTM from your server.
 * Follow the step by step procedures

To install for use as a standalone program


 * Unzip the THUMINDX zip file to a "ThumbIndex" directory (say, D:\THUMINDX)
 * 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.
 * Create a ThumbIndex batch file. See THUMINDX.TXT for the details
 * Run THUMINX.CMD from an OS/2 command prompt, and give it this batch file.

Hints x:\ThumIndx>thumindx thum1.in to save status messages to an output file, use x:\ThumIndx>thumindx thum1.in > results.out using a command line parameter of ? will give you some on-line help
 * 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:

An alternative
For an alternative method of making thumbnails, you can try the ThumbSRE/WWWThumb thumbnail creator

Download

 * version 1.30

License
Freeware

Author

 * Daniel Hellerstein