Image Thumbnail Generator For Mac

[benos]

My friend, who's now on a Mac (thank the Lord), is looking for an app that will generate thumbnails for a folder full of images, and create some sort of easily uploadable directory to upload/FTP. I'm completely clueless in this department...

Thanks!

be

[BritinUSA]

I don't have my mac with me (stuck at work at the moment). I thought iPhoto can do this, you can upload images to it I think....

[shred]

Later versions of Photoshop do this pretty well, but run several $

[George]

OK, here we go.

This is a freeware OSX contextual menu plug-in that allows you to do batch work on whole folders of images at once (resize, strip meta data, etc.). The readme tells all:

http://www.glinder.com/files/MacOSXSoftware/PhotoToolCM.dmg

Here is a freeware batch renaming utility for OSX that makes it easy to add a thumbnail prefix/suffix to a batch of resized images:

http://www.glinder.com/files/MacOSXSoftware/Renamer4Mac.dmg

Experiment with these on dupes of things until you get the hang of it. Always use duplicate folders of images to create your gallery image sets as these are destructive methods in that they change the files you are acting on.

Here is an open source PHP driven gallery system that works pretty nicely and is one of the easier setups out there. It will run on most any webserver using Apache with PHP enabled. It does NOT require MySQL unlike a lot of similar open source gallery script systems out there which is what makes it simple. In a nutshell, you upload the whole folder of source files that comprise the script system and set the file and directory permissions as specified in the instructions. Then you prep individual folders of images and their corresponding thumbs using the two previous utilities and upload the folders into the main root gallery folder and BAM! Instant web gallery with a full admin backend and lotsa nice features.

http://www.glinder.com/files/Scripts/PK_PHPMyGallery.zip

Here is the text file manual for PHPMyGallery:

PHPmyGallery_manual_users.txt

Last, but not least, good ole' PhotoShop. Take a folder of random sized images of any file format (jpg, tif, gif, psd, etc...) and using the Automate option in the File menu you can auto create galleries in a folder that only needs to be uploaded and then called with a / at the end of the folder name and url it's at.

All the above methods require FTP access to a webserver and some familarity with all things web.

To put it simply, it is simple and yet not so simple all at the same time ;-)

The absolute easiest way to do it without learning how to do it for real is to buy a $99/year .Mac account and use the automated gallery system it gives you. It links up with iPhoto and makes it so simple, it's not even funny. They even supply the webspace for you. This is about as plug-n-play as it gets.

PM me if you need more info about the tricky ways to do it.

--

Regards,

[benos]

That's beautiful G - Thank you! Should be just what she needs. And I'll take a look at the PHP app after she gets the folders ready - it'll be a nice lesson for me.

I've experimented with the Photoshop batch resizing, and it's pretty much a PITA, compared to how "it should work." Henning coded a batch photo resizing app that works beautifully - for PC's only. So she had to let that go to move on over to Mac - but that should be the largest of her troubles.

She thanks you.

be

[Greg Jones]

As a FYI, the link above to the PhotoTool CM download is to an older (v. 1.4) version. The current version is 2.0 and is available from the developer's site here.

[George]

As a FYI, the link above to the PhotoTool CM download is to an older (v. 1.4) version

Not anymore ;-)