What is the thumbnail gallery builder?

Presenting thumbnail images on a web page and linking each image to either a full-size image file or another page conatining the picture requires masses of repetitive HTML. Which is why galleries are usually coded using VBScript or PHP or another server-side scripting technology.

Putting the pages together by hand is exceptionally boring after the first few images . . .

This application uses thumbnail and full-sized image files, together with optional text files containing descriptive information, to create a gallery file system and the necessary HTML pages.

Download the application: tgb.zip

Gallery pages are repetetive because they contain many instances of image files, the only differences between each being the content of the image file, its name and maybe a caption.

A site serving these pages will be easier to maintain, too, if the files are stored in some kind of database structure and the pages generated as and when requested. Which makes server-side scripting the ideal way to handle them.

If scripting isn't an option - perhaps the web server doesn't support scripting or you're putting together something that will be shipped as HTML on a CD - then the gallery needs to consist thumbnails and image files and properly coded HTML documents.

The thumbnail gallery builder takes small- and full-size images, copies them to a destination file system then creates the HTML pages necessary to complete the gallery. Optional data in text files can be used to improve the presentation of the pages. The file system can then be exported to a web site or onto a CD.

You need a folder containing all the thumbnail images and another containing all the full-size images to which the thumbs will link. These should each have the same file name; that is the thumbnail file

C:\SourceImages\Thumbnails\image1.gif

is the small-sized version of the image file

C:\SourceImages\image1.gif

as an example.

The settings allow the thumbnail gallery to present the small images in rows of between one image and six. The caption below each thumbnail may be blank (no checkboxes selected) or can show the file name and/or a text description. If the text description is selected then there must be text files available.

The full-sized image options allow the thumbnails to link to the image only (the image will be rendered in the browser window) or placed in a HTML page. If the HTML page option is selected a name for the HTML page can be placed into the associated text file (so the HTML page will be named BeachHoliday.htm, for instance) If there is no text file then the image name is used to name the HTML pages giving, for example, image1.htm.

Also available when the HTML page option is selected are caption texts for the full-size image, again these need to be available in a text file.

The text file can be generated in a number of ways, the easiest manual method is to create it using Notepad. Each row (each line of text) conatins a different item of information.

The format used is

All the image files are copied to the output file system - The original files are left where they were.

The HTML pages are at the top of the file structure (in its root) and all the links are relative to this root folder. The entire structure can be copied, moved or otherwise exported to its destination.

Unzip tgb.zip to a convenient folder and run setup.exe which will take you through the installation.

The files included in the package were passed safe by Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition 7.5 from Symantec, updated to 10. February 2003.

To uninstall the application, use the Add/Remove Software option from the Windows Control Panel.

The application should be fairly self-explanatory . . .

Use the setting to format the thumbnail page and the full-sized image presentation (Covered in the text above)

Use the folder navigators to locate the source files and the root folder for output.

Click build.

Please send any feedback to me at chrisgpearson@hotmail.com.

Thanks!