Figure that you are covering a wedding, and that you would like to split the gallery into 3
general areas, each of approximately 300 images, then later feedback from your user will
dictate which images stay, and which need editing. You would then use this tool for
each of the 3 areas, deciding on thumb size, number across the page and total per page, but
especially taking into consideration cell phone or tablet browsing. This needs to be
mentioned because you need to understand the importance of the layout, and especially the
thumb sizes per area. After 15 minutes with this tool you would have all of the content,
and all 3 area titles except for a text description of the main gallery, and of the 3 areas,
which you can create unto textfiles and just include with the publishing.
By now you realize that something else besides the publishing is playing a big role, but
you don't necessarily need our Makecraft Gallery Stock™ web application, and can just
publish to your website or hand over the content to your developer. However, our
gallery application allows your end users in flagging images, describing the action needed
and specifically requesting work from a list of standard image enhancements, including
specific description of the requests per image. But for the Quick Pix Size Publish
tool all you have to care about is to quickly generate a full day of work within 15 minutes.
To get this application you may have to download, install and run our DetectNET2 tool
to determine if the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is installed, if you need it then follow
our links to Microsoft, install version 2.0 SP1 if on Windows 2000 (no longer supported),
or else the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 (mostly Windows XP). Or you might
at first skip the .NET 2.0 detection, install the graphical application, and if the
DLL error occurs when first launching it then proceed with our DetectNET2 tool to install
the Framework, and the graphical application would then successfully launch.
You then proceed with the following application steps: Register, purchase and request
the unlock key, then enter or paste the key into the appropriate application text box,
and exit and re-launch the application. Please see the time saving features in the
bellow bulleted list.
Quick Pix Size Publish features:
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Generate normalized image and thumb sizes. Normalized refers to web friendly
image sizes, which prevent browser clutter and freezing, especially when there is other
traffic. Following the publishing steps you should browse the website as if you
were an end user, and detect which images you need to manually publish, possibly due
to lighting conditions, and the rare need for a larger size for that type of
picture. These steps handle content for one of your gallety chapters, and
save you hours of work. Remember to always save copies of the original camera
images, as they represent the preferred source for editing.
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Name image results starting with date taken. Capture the original image's
'Date taken' (from camera) to head the name of each image results, using 'yyyymmdd '
format. Should the original image name already start with a valid yyyymmdd date, or
should the image provide no 'Date taken' then the name is unchanged. Note that
pasting an image unto a new image will result on no Date taken for the new image,
therefore, always guard against losing Date taken for an image, say, of a birthday.
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Leave mundane tasks to the application and concentrate on editing. There is
enough work to be done when fine tuning the look of a gallery, and no one needs to be
spending hours performing repetitious resizing, saving, and avoiding human typos and
errors in the process. Just browse the results and make manual adjustments to
the minority of the items.
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This tool will interface with Makecraft Gallery Stock™. This publishing tool
generates Thumb Viewer Parameter Folders, which interface with our time saving web gallery
by adapting to the user friendly Windows Explorer interface. When thorougly reviewing
the follow-up steps to keep gallery maintenance under control this tool is a win-win,
whether you optionally adapt to your new web gallery application or not.
Detailed layout example:
Since each photography event may be split into different areas of the website the user
can drive the menu hierarchy from a Windows Explorer perspective, just creating a new menu
level and populating it with other levels and/or with tips or ends of the branch, namely
called Thumb Viewer pages, each containing 'images' and 'thumbs' sub-folders. The
results enable a lengthy affair to be carried out in minutes, while the only time
constraint is the filtering out of bad photos, or the editing of those in need. And
the visitor just browses or drills down through the menu levels. Please notice that
the indentation in the below Menu item column relates to the menu level in this illustration
only, and these equate to the sub-folder levels for the photographer to track.
The following illustration will make it easier to follow the purpose and usage of
this application. It encompasses a fictitious photography gallery, using test customer
events and their chapters, which are driven by user-created menus and sub-menus, and the help of
this application to roll out each set of chapter images and thumbs to their corresponding area:
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Menu item
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Description or Tasks
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Jack and Joe - 2013 Expedition to Cave Island
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Place this event folder on 'Galleries' folder, and populate it with AnyName.txt for an
event description, and Any Other Name.jpg for a front image. All front images
fade in. This is the first menu level, and is all that visitors will see
when first visiting the gallery, unless there are more photography events. You
might decide to make this event a level-1, and to incorporate a main event, such as the
current year or period, just to minimize scrolling on the first page of the gallery, and
to also minimize scrolling by limiting event volume to a year or period, or maybe to
event categories. It is very probable that in the future you may need to spread the
menu hierarchy through event chapter shuffling in order to minimize scrolling.
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Jack convincing Joe to come along{2-2-300-0}
images
thumbs
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Run the application to create the 'Jack convincing Joe to come along' title, provide the
thumbs across, thumbs per page, thumb width and/or thumb height parameters, and let the
process automatically generate the 4 parameters trailing the folder title. Also
provide your dedicated temporary folder containing only the 6 jpg images that belong in
this thumb viewer. These high quality originals have been edited and cropped, and
should remain safely on file elsewhere, while the application will automatically create
6 thumbnails of the specified 300 pixel width, each with the corresponding height for that
image's aspect ratio, be it a portrait or landscape orientation. The application will
add the 'images' and 'thumbs' sub-folders, add the 6 thumbs to the 'thumbs' folder, using the
same corresponding name of the original image, then the application also creates 6 1024 or
1280 pixel wide images of a lesser quality than the original and places them in the 'images'
sub-folder. The web visitor reaches this end of a tree branch, navigates 3 pages, each
with 2 thumbs per row, as you have specified, and either advances to the larger image by
clicking a thumb, or presses First, Previous, Next or Last Page, or Previous page, or
presses Exit to return to the parent menu. Once you are viewing the larger image you
can also press First, Previous, Next or Last Image in slide show fashion, while in view
mode, or Exit to return to the 3 page thumb viewer. This logic will apply to any
follow-up event chapter folder which uses the 4 thumb viewer parameters, and each
application task is meant to speed up the propagation of the corresponding images
and thumbs, and all you have to do is just edit the high quality originals and
place copies on your dedicated source folder for this application's process.
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Charting the trip
dummy
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The second level-1 menu is only populated with AnyName.txt for a brief event chapter description,
and with Any Other Name.jpg for front image. Add 'dummy' empty folder, signifying that this
is the end of this tree branch, and carries no thumb viewer.
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The Journey
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This level-1 menu will include thumb viewing end-of-tree branches, as well as
level-2 menus, and you can build on multiple levels depending on your audiences
and browsers. For instance, when targetting iPhone you may want a smaller
number of thumbs across and thumbs per page, thus allowing the user just to use
the First, Previous, Next or Last Page feature. Keep in mind that the reason
for the thumb viewers is to avoid having to paginate through countless pages just
searching for an image, when you can spot it from several thumbs in one page, and
only then advancing to the larger image.
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Arrival and discovery of a lake{5-15-100-0}
images
thumbs
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This is the first level-2 thumb viewer area, where 400 thumbnails have been designated
100 pixels in width at 5 per row for 3 rows per page, and 27 pages to navigate. These
thumbs are clear enough so that their smaller width still describes the image on a smaller
screen for a cell phone device. You can clearly determine that editing 400 images for
this sub-folder was enough work, and that relying on the application for the corresponding
400 web-friendly images and 400 smaller thumbnails was very much desirable, especially if
you have to publish this in time. Just lightly edit and crop the large originals,
safely back them up, and provide just the 400 copies to this application, and you wind
up with 400 corresponding images of a web-friendlier size, and their 400 corresponfing
thumbs. You drive the menu hierarchy, titles, descriptions, front pages, and
thumbnail parameters. Note that you can include other thumb viewer folders
adjacent to the 'Arrival and discovery' folder, and the menu would just list them
on that same level.
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Future journey plans
dummy
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Back to a level-1 menu, where you can keep growing new menu branches, but for the
purposes of this illustration we end here by just populating the folder with the
AnyName.txt for a brief description of the map, and the Any Other Image.jpg image
of your 'secret' map, just to entice the audience to join in. And of course
include the empty 'dummy' folder to tell the website that there is no thumb
vieweing on this end of a branch.
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