If you have any questions or comments about ThumbBorker, please drop
us a line at thumbborker-help@borkware.com.
Thank you for using ThumbBorker.
To use ThumbBorker, first start the program, and then choose Load Directory from the File menu. ThumbBorker will then look for image files (such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, and other upper-case acronyms) in the directory you specify, and any sub-directories. You'll then see a window like this:
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Working With Image Files
When you select a directory of image files, ThumbBorker will look in that directory and all sub-directories for image files. If it finds any files, their filenames will be put into the Original Files list. If you click on a filename, the view area will show the image.If you like the image, click Keep to move the image file name down into the Thumbnails list. It will then be used when you make the thumbnails.
If you don't like the image, click Remove to remove it from your file list. This only removes it from the list, it does not remove the file from your disk.
To see an image, and its selection rectangle (if there is one), click on the file name in either list. The selected image will appear in the view area, along with its selection.
Working With an Image
When you click on a file name in the Original Files or Thumbnails list, the view area will display the picture and the status line will show the full path to the image.Click the rotation buttons to rotate the image in 90-degree increments. This does not change the image on disk. The buttons only change how ThumbBorker looks at the image. The thumbnail, and the copied original will be rotated.
You can click-drag a selection rectangle, like in iPhoto, to highlight the area you want to use for the thumbnail. If you decide you don't want a selection rectangle, just single-click in the gray area of the view area. A shift-click when dragging out a selection will make the selection rectangle a perfect square. You can move the selection rectangle around by clicking in it and dragging it around.
Making Thumbnails
There are seven different controls when dealing with thumbnail generation:
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Six affect the final output, and the Make Thumbnails button starts the process cranking along.The top Max Width and Max Height text fields control how large each thumbnail will be. The width and height of the thumbnail won't exceed these values. The image (or the selected area, if there is one) will be scaled down proportionally to fit within these values.
If you check the With HTML checkbox, ThumbBorker will create an
index.html
file with your thumbnails in it.If you check the Copy Originals checkbox, ThumbBorker will copy the original files to the place where the thumbnails are generated. ThumbBorker actually converts the files to JPEG, and doesn't allow them to be larger than the bottom set of Max Width and Max Height values. Digital camera images tend to be too large to be useful for web pages, so by choosing Copy Originals and providing a reasonably sized maximum width and height, you can have larger versions for your users to enjoy, but not to be so big as to be useless.
When you're finally ready to create your thumbnails, click the Make Thumbnails button. ThumbBorker will ask you to pick a destination directory. You will probably want to create a new directory to put your resultant thumbnails, and other stuff.
ThumbBorker will then process your chosen thumbnail images and deposit them in your directory, along with the html file (if you wanted it) and copied originals (if you wanted them).
Customizing the HTML Page
You can customize the generation of HTML pages. ThumbBorker wasn't designed to be the end-all-be-all of web page generation software, so it may make more sense to have ThumbBorker generate an HTML page to use for proofing, and then use a perl script or some other mechanism for actually building your web page.When you choose HTML Snippets from the image menu, a large sheet will drop down with 6 major text areas, and one minor text area.
Document Header is what gets put into the HTML file first. Use this for stuff like the
<head>
section, page title, and so on.Before THumbnails gets put into the HTML file next. Use this for opening any kind of HTML construct to display the thumbnail images in.
<ul>
or<table>
or tags are particularly useful.For each image is the text that gets generated for each thumbnail as it is processed. Use the magic cookie
%@
to identify the place you want the<img>
text to go. For tables you would use something like<td>%@</td>
, for unordered lists, it'd be more like<li> %@
For every X images is some HTML to be generated after every X image (and you can define which X). So if you were wanting to have four thumbnails per row in a table, you would close a row and open a new row in this text box, and have
X = 4
After Thumbnails is added to the HTML file after all of the thumbnails have been processed. Usually you will close whatever HTML entity you opened in Before Thumbnails
Document Footer is any other miscellaneous HTML you want placed after the thumbnails.
Click OK to save these values, or Cancel to discard them.
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thumbborker-help@borkware.com