Hi,
Can anybody recommend a program which creates Previews of
Pictures in a folder in a Grid? I have heard that
there are such programms which are free and can do this.
Thanks.
If I've understood you correctly, Markus, you're looking for a way to
make a thumbnail sheet (?). If that's the case, Irfanview can do this
for you and is free for personal use. You can find it here:
http://www.irfanview.com/
I've just pulled it up but I'm going to go through it. Though not an
extremely powerful thumbnailer, Irfanview is so packed with stuff that
there would be a bit of a learning curve. This way, you'll cut
through a lot of that since I've hopefully outlined it clearly enough
below.
I have Irfanview v3.70 and I see that there been an upgrade or two. I
already have most of the instructions below typed up so just to let
you know that they might be slightly different. Darn. Here's hoping.
I should have checked first.
Anyway, to do the thumbnailing, launch Irfanview. Command is under
FILE > THUMBNAILS. This launches a separate thumbnails viewer.
Navigate with it to the folder you want to thumbnail and it'll load
the pix. You can modify the borders to create a grid, most
definitely, as well as sizes ahead of time via OPTIONS > SET THUMBNAIL
OPTIONS.
You might have to play with the sizes of the thumbnails if you use
very long descriptive names, as I do. The longer the filename the
larger the images have to be so that the text doesn't get scrunched
up.
If you need these thumbnails as just as simple image file and not just
as a browsing instrument, SELECT all the thumbnails and then click
FILE > SAVE SELECTED THUMBS AS AN IMAGE and save to a folder of your
choice to the graphics format you need. You pretty much just get what
you see with no editing capabilities, it seems. But useful for a fast
thumbnail sheet.
Or you can make an actual contact sheet which does allow you to modify
settings. This command is also under the FILE menu. Once you choose
this contact sheet option, a box comes up where the modification to
font size, etc., can be made. Once done, hit CREATE and the contact
sheet gets transferred over to Irfanview's main interface. Save as an
image file once there if everything okay.
Two other options in the thumbnail viewer under FILE that are useful:
SAVE SELECTED THUMBS AS SINGLE IMAGES - pretty much self-explanatory,
and SAVE SELECTED THUMBS AS HTML FILE - very, very useful if your
contact sheet will actually be part of a webpage. What is absolutely
awesome is that if you so choose, you can set a destination folder and
everything is copied there, including html file with thumbnail pix so
it's practically ready to upload via ftp to your site! Be sure to
keep the COPY ORIGINAL IMAGES TO DESTINATION FOLDER. I checked it so
got a copy of all my pix along with the created thumbnail images <g>!
Also, the box seems to default to 1 column, so you need to change that
to, perhaps, 3 or more or whatever so that you get a nice sheet.
However, youl'll know best.
This was fun. I hadn't done it in over a year but once I figured it
out I guess that one time, it was easy to go back and do it again even
if so much time had passed. Too, I'll have this sheet as a reference
point for next time.
*********************************
Irfanview does not have the power of a thumbnail program, but it's
very, very feature rich and robust and makes darn good thumbnail
documents and graphics. And the price is just right!
hth
