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Reviews/Software
ThumbsPlus Version 4.1
from: Cerious Software
Check for the latest version of ThumbsPlus here:
English
German
If you’ve been surfing the Internet for any amount of time, chances are you’ve come across a page filled with full sized images that took forever to download. In the end many surfers get frustrated and
give up. That’s why a thumbnail gallery is a popular way to display images on the Web. A thumbnail gallery is a table with mini images or “thumbnails” of the larger files inserted into the table cells. A
hyperlink is built between the thumbnail and the larger image and when the thumbnail is clicked with the mouse the larger image is loaded into the browser.
A thumbnail is normally only around 1 to 3 kilobytes in size while the average full sized image can be anywhere from 40 kb on up. The simple mathematics makes the advantage quite clear. A page with a
thumbnail gallery with even 20 thumbnails will load quicker than one single full sized image. What this does for you visitor is speed up their page loading- making for happy surfing. It also offers
your visitor a preview of the images- giving them a choice of which image to view or not.
But a thumbnail gallery can be a royal pain in the bum to build and it gets worse the more photos you have. That’s all those wee images to resize, all those HTML documents to create, tables to lay out.
Even if you do it once and and copy it as a template, you still need to stick all the the little pictures in the table and build all the links between the thumbnail and full sized image. It’s tedious,
mistakes get made- even with hotshot HTML editing software.
That’s where ThumbsPlus comes to the rescue.
ThumbsPlus is an image management software package with loads of useful features that you will find in most other software in the genre, but it also has one feature that not even Paint Shop Pro or Adobe
Photoshop can boast of- a thumbnail gallery generator.
So let’s take a quick look at ThumbsPlus.
Even if you have no desire to make a web site, ThumbsPlus is worth having for its image management capabalities alone. I call ThumbsPlus an “image management” package as opposed to an “image editor”.
ThumbsPlus is all about handling, sorting and most importantly, viewing the images you have stored in your computer.
The interface is set up very similarly to the Windows Explorer browser making it immediately familiar and intuitive. Your computer’s folders are arranged on a “tree”
to the left and the image files are displayed as thumbnails to the right.
The ThumbsPlus browser can be set up to display your images in any of five ways and preferences can also be adjusted to have the program open in the same folder every time.
The toolbar is a very well thought out design and is fully customizable allowing you to drag and drop the buttons you want from a dialogue box and to discard less frequently used ones.
The menu offers common image editing choices such as cropping, resizing, rotating and mirroring images as well as filters like blur, sharpen and embossing/etching effects.
Other useful choices are “Batch Process” which allows you to make the same change to many images at once, “Convert To” which converts an image instantly to one of a
variety of formats (jpg, bmp, tif etc) and “Sort By” which allows you to sort your images in a wide variety of ways.
Three extremely useful buttons are:
“Run Editor” which opens the selected image in your default image editor
“Slide Show” allows you to begin a slide show with one click of the button.
“Wallpaper” which makes the selected image your computer’s wallpaper in one click.
One very nice feature you might enjoy playing with is the “Copy to Clipboard” (Screen Capture) tool. After going through a very simple set up dialogue, you can capture any
window or screen you see on your computer simply by pressing the “Print Screen” button on your computer’s keyboard. All the screen captures you see in this article were made with this feature.
If you like using keyboard shortcuts then you will loveThumbsPlus. Practically every menu command has a keyboard shortcut- saving you loads of time!
And now we come to the feature I mentioned at the start of this review. The Web Page Wizard. With this tool, making thumbnail galleries for your web site is a snap! Let’s say,
for example, you want to display 360 images in your gallery with 12 photos per page.
By using the simple dialogue menu, you can set preferences for your gallery like table size/positioning, page/table background color, images per page, page name/heading
text and you can save your layout schemes (useful if you have more than one website).
Then you just click “finish” and go pour yourself a cup of coffee. When you get back ThumbsPlus will have generated 30 HTML documents with tables (for the above example),
inserted thumbnails into each cell, built a link between the thumbnail/full sized image and even added a navigation menu at the bottom of every page. You could hardly ask for
more. Of course it works for smaller amounts of photos as well.
ThumbsPlus is probably the single most useful piece of software we have ever purchased and it is used constantly on our computer. I give ThumbsPlus a huge thumbs up!
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Go here to find out more or to download the latest version of ThumbsPlus:
Cerious Software- http://www.cerious.com US
Kelly Media-http://www.kellymedia.de/shop/index.html Germany
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