Why Thumbs?Thumbs exists because although many programs exist to generate thumbnails for web pages they don't take into account generating lots of images and making them viewable by anybody. For example: I went on vacation and came back with 462 images organized into 21 folders. I wanted to send a CD of those images to my friends that had traveled with me on my vacation as well as friends we had met and also to my family. Most of my friends are not computer experts like me so they most likely did not have software to view the images. So, I thought I'd make a CD and put HTML thumbnails of all the images. I knew that they all had browsers so I thought this would be perfect. Unfortunately there were problems. The first problem I found was that all the software I had for making HTML thumbnails would only do one folder at a time. I had 21 folders. Sure I could go into each folder and run the program but I wanted more. I wanted each page of thumbnails to say Page X of N (example Page 5 of 21). I wanted each page to link to the next page and previous page to make it easy to browse through all the thumbnails. And, I wanted an index page with a link to each page of thumbnails. I did this all by hand and boy was it a pain in the butt. Not only that but after I had finished I decided to add another folder of images and that meant I had to go back and fix all the "Page 5 of 21" to "Page 5 of 22" etc and fix links on 2 pages to insert the new page and add the new page to the index page. What a pain! After I had made 2 or 3 CDs I found the second problem. The second problem was all my images were 1600x1200 pixels. Most of my friends are not running 1600x1200 displays. I suspect most of them are running 1024x768 and a few may even be running as low as 800x600. If they clicked on a thumbnail they were given the 1600x1200 image and on an 800x600 that means they could view at most 1/4 of the image at once. Hardly useful or very fun. I had a batch image processing program so I generated 800x600 images of all 462 images. Then, by hand, I made a page for each image to display this 800x600 image and if clicked on would go to the 1600x1200 image. I then by hand fixed all the links from the thumbnails to point to these new pages. I could not have just generate a new thumbnail page with the software I had because it would have made thumbnails for not only the 1600x1200 original images but also for 800x600 images and even for the thumbnails it had generated earlier. There would have been 3 thumbnails for each image. It would have also not linked the 800x600 images to the original size images. All this by hand effort worked except for a few inconveniences. These new pages where not linked to each other. No Next and Prev links. That meant that to view the images you would go to a page of thumbnails, click on an image, then to view the next image you had to click "Back" on your browser and then select the next image. It might sound simple here but try it, it's very confusing. Especially if you are several images in, it's hard to remember where you were. "Was I 2 rows down on the 3rd image or 3 rows down on the 2nd image?" The other problem was the 800x600 images took more space on the CD. Before I noticed the 1600x1200 viewing problems I had added some stuff to the CD. I had added digitized video of the vacation as well as a few other things. The CD was almost full. Fortunately the 800x600 images just fit. They took almost 40meg and the CD ended up with 651 meg of data on it (according to Windows Explorer) Thumbs solves all these problems:
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