Thumbnail Generator Online
THBHtmlGallery creates your online website at least the thumbnails. The created static html website uses javascript to present your picturs online on your website.
THBHtmlGallery can take your pictures, create small thumbnail pictures and create browser compatible output pictures.
The resulting pictures are stored along with html and javascript files on your harddisk.
The generated static html file can be opened and viewed with your browser.
What you will see is a dynamically animated index of all pictures and a main picture showing the selected picture. To show you what we are talking about you can go to the Screenshots section of this website. If you have troubles viewing the screenshots please take a look at the troubleshooting thumbnail creation section.
THBHtmlGallery uses spry ajax library to animate the thumbnails and
THBHtmlGallery comes as a THBHtmlGalleryGUI.exe graphical user interface application and THBHtmlGallery.exe console application for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7.
User Interface for the thumbnail creator
You can either use the GUI version or the pure console application, functionality does not differ in fact the GUI application will generate a command (cmd) file that calls the console application. So you could use the GUI application to generate the command file for you.
Command line arguments
When using THBHtmlGallery console application you have to provide some arguments. When starting THBHtmlGallery.exe -h without any arguments you will get a list of all available argumennts.
Console application of the thumbnails generator
The console application of the thumbnails generator help information looks like this:
THBHtmlGallery.exe
[-e] [-l <string>] [-o
<string>] -i <string> [-r <int>]
[-q <int>] -v <int> [-u <int>] -t
<int> [--] [--version] [-h]
-i <string>, --inputpictures <string>
(required) Folder inclusive filemask of thumbnail pictures to process
-v <int>, --maxthumbsize <int>
(required) Maximum size of the created thumbnail.
-t <int>, --type <int>
(required) Type of the thumbnail gallery, the freeware edition supports type 1
only.
-e, --reencode
Reads and writes out all picture files no matter if they are already
in jpeg or gif format.
-l <string>, --logfilename <string>
Textfile of the thumbnail generator for logging
-o <string>, --outputfolder <string>
Optionally you can specify the output folder of the created thumbnails gallery
-r <int>, --jpegQuality <int>
jpeg quality ranging from 0 to 100.
-q <int>, --thumbJpegQuality <int>
jpeg quality of the small thumbs ranging from 0 to 100.
-u <int>, --maxpicturesize <int>
Maximum size of the picture.
-h, --help
Displays usage information and exits.A complete call could look like this
"THBHtmlGallery.exe" -l "c:\THBHtmlGalleryLog.txt" -o "c:\Gallery" -i "S:\Pics\CarShow\*.*" -r 55 -q 55 -v 100 -u 600 -t 1Source picture folder
Folder inclusive filemask of pictures to process.
Example:
C:\Pics\RockyMountains\*.jpg
c:\Cars\*.*
Picture source folder
If the folder contains other files like text documents or anything else THBHtmlGallery will try to load them as picture file, will fail and produce a log entry. At the end you will get a fine thumbnail gallery too. You can use the filter mask of the source folder to create a thumbnail gallery and just consider jpeg or png files.
If your source folder contains subfolders THBHtmlGallery will generate a multigallery and will ignore all files directly in the source folder and instead just considers picture files from subfolders.
To create a multi gallery your source folder has to contain one or more subfolders. Each subfolder will be generated as a separate gallery. Files found directly within the source folder will be ignored.
Multi gallery
A single gallery is a single set of pictures created from one folder on your harddisk labelled with the foldername.
sourcefolder
pic1.jpg
pic2.jpg
pic3.jpgA multi gallery will be created if your source folder contains subfolders. THBHtmlGallery will create a gallery for each subfolder and present all these galleries within a single page. The user can choose the gallery by clicking on a link.
sourcefolder
subgallery1
pic1.jpg
pic2.jpg
pic3.jpg
subgallery2
gall2pic1.jpg
gall2pic2.jpg
gall2pic3.jpg
subgallery3
gall3pic1.jpg
gall3pic2.jpg
gall3pic3.jpgIf your created gallery is a multi gallery although you did not intend to create one ensure that you have choosen the correct source folder and ensure that your source folder does not contain any subfolders. Just picturefiles.
A multigallery just containing one subfolder will result in the same gallery as a single gallery.
Using the same filename within subgalleries currently does not work.
Output folder
In general you should specify the output folder. If you don’t specify it your html thumbnail gallery will be generated in the application folder.
Ensure that there is enough space on your harddisk and that you have sufficient privileges to write to the output folder.
Reencoding pictures files
Reading jpeg files and storing them again as jpeg file adds a loss of information because jpeg is a lossy compression codec. So in general you should try to not reencode jpeg into jpeg without having a reason to do so.
So why is there a reencode flag? Typical web browsers can read jpeg and gif files (some browsrs can read other formats too but jpeg and gif are supported by all of them), when you pass a source folder just containing jpeg or gif files we could copy them directly into the resulting images folder of the created gallery and actually we will do so if you omit the reencode flag and you don’t provide a maximum picture size limit.
The problem what you may get here is that jpeg is not always equal to jpeg and gif is not always equal to gif. Both picture formats allow a bunch of different kinds like grayscale jpeg, cmyk jpeg or 12bit gif file. Many browsers will flag these pictures as invalid and simply wont show them. To ensure this does not happen you can use the reencode flag.
If you know that your source pictures can be viewed with the browser you should not use the reencode flag. Just add it if you have troubles with your pictures.
Created Files
After creating thumbnails your ouput folder contains a css, imagesd, thumbnails, spry folders plus the html file showing the created thumbnail gallery.
Folder containing the created slideshow gallery
Technique
THBHtmlGallery uses static html javascript, ajax, css, Spry framework for Ajax to create static html pages that you can view directly from your harddisk or you can upoad the generated gallery to your website and publish it on the web. The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library that provides easy-to-use yet powerful Ajax functionality that allows us to build pages that provide a richer experience for users.
Supported raster image formats
THBHtmlGallery is powered by THBImage and thus suports all THBImage image formats.
Reads and writes all common raster image formats BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF, Multipage TIFF, PSD, PBM, PGM, PPM, …
Free version versus Pro version
The free version is a fully functional version that you can use to create your thumbnail galleries. Professional users may benefit from the advanced functionality of the Pro version.
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Generating a fully functional javascript animated thumbnail gallery |  | |
| Unlimited picturesize | limited to 600x600 pixels | |
| Support for multipage files like tiff, psd files(layers will be treated as page) | |
The Pro version can extract all pages of multipage files too. Tiff is a typical multipage fileformat. The created thumbnail gallery will contain a thumbnail of each page. In case of Adobe Photoshop PSD files layers will treated as individual pages.
Troubleshooting
To view the created thumbnail gallery you need javascript activated. Without javascript the slideshow animation wont work. Nowadays browsers may forbid active content. This looks like this in Microsoft Intertnet Explorer.
Active content turned off
Popups blocked