Extreme Thumbnail Generator

www.exisoftware.com

_{Reviewed by} Maureen Shannon, NJPCUG

Extreme Thumbnail Generator is another product offered to NJPCUG members at a discount by Exisoftware. It’s another item that I have used and am very impressed with. It does what it is supposed to without any problems and offers the user numerous options to customize the thumbnails.

This application is used create a set of web pages (web photo albums) with thumbnails from your images. It doesn’t just make thumbnails but the actual thumbnail web page and the pages with the individual original images. Within this application, you can add effects too. You can also change the image names or the view by rotating them. It’s another full featured application that is really handy to have for anyone who wants to display their images on the web. Online businesses who have pages of products linked off of a thumbnails will love this application because it’s so fast and easy to work with.

This is the opening interface of the application. There are four steps to completion…..if you want to use all of them. First is this page where you add the images and enter a description. The preview window allows you to view each image on the list. Following the buttons between the image list and the preview area you can: add images, add a folder(s), remove an image, clear the list, move an image up or down, rotate images clockwise or counterclockwise, sort the images (by file name ascending, by file name descending, by file path ascending, by file path descending, by file size ascending, by file size descending, by file date ascending, by file date descending, by image size ascending, by image size descending) , and the final button takes you to a screen where images can be enhanced with a variety of effects.

The image appears in the preview window allowing you to view the effects as you add them. You have the option to apply the effects to both the image and the thumbnail or just the thumbnail. You can also apply the particular effects to all of the images in the project. If you don’t like the effects, a button click removes them. Optional effects are: brightness & contrast, anti-alias, blur, noise, lightness, miscellaneous which include mosaic and saturation, and more: which adds an emboss effect, grayscale, or inverts the image. Clicking the effects and returns you to the main screen.

In the Gallery view (second step), you select the style of the web page design you want to apply to the thumbnail page. Clicking on a thumbnail will bring you to a page with the enlargement. Depending on the style it will either be a separate page or one with thumbnails displayed on it. You can also edit the templates here. “Special tags can be included in the text of HTML templates using the [# and #] symbols around them. When the gallery is being generated, these tags, including the brackets, are replaced with the values you enter. For example, to add a gallery title to the page you have to add the following special tag: [#gallery.title#].”

To view a web site where I have this application in use go to: http://home.earthlink.net/~fuzzyfuzzlet/kittens/index.html Please don’t look too closely at the image names, I was running tests and didn’t pay attention to the fact that each time I changed something in another application it added “cat” in front of the previous name which originally was “cat”. I ended up with images that were named cat_cat_cat…….! I made a new album but I haven’t had the time to upload it yet. However, this display was well worth adding to my friend’s web site……see the note below.

Use the Options page to set up the thumbnail and image pages information.  This is the third step.

Once you have made all the changes and additions you want to the thumbnails and images, you click the “Generate” button for the final step and it creates the web pages for you. It’s so easy to do and it works great. I used this to create a set of pages with thumbnails on the kitten web site that I have been mentioning lately. I thought about adding a feature where visitors to the site could jump right to new photos of the kittens without going through the web site plus I wanted to test how this worked. It did a great job and I was pretty impressed with it. 

This product makes the process of creating a thumbnail from a batch of photos so simple that you’ll love working with it. Couple this with the additional option of adding effects to the images and/or the thumbnails and you have a very handy tool to aid you with your web work. Digital photographers, professional or amateur will appreciate what this can do for them. It’s a great time saver. It’s also handy for anyone who is doing web design plus those who provide content. It will give you complete control of the web albums and it will save you time and money.

 (Generated image of the finshed web design)

*Note: If you think that it’s not essential to use the best quality images in your work, which means using good tools to reach that goal, consider this, an animal talent agent in NYC needed a kitten for an Estee Lauder product shoot this week (9 July 04), this kitten ended up getting the job because it’s photo was available online and the agent was able to see these kittens. All three went to the photo shoot which included a super model, and this little guy got the job!

This application retails for $34.95 and NJPCUG members are offered a 25% discount on our web site. This offer is good through December. This is another of our recent offers that I would recommend and it’s certainly affordable. It’s easy enough for any level of computer user.

System requirements:  Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP

Another example: The wedding of the daughter of friends of ours who live in Singapore in May 2003 & the photo of their new baby born in April of this year. Seems like only yesterday that my Daniel and JJ were little children playing together and now JJ is a mother and Daniel is about to become a father!

 (Opens in a separate window - Click the X to close it)