I’ve used the crop feature in MaxiGallery, but the obvious downside is that it crops every image in the same place. Has anyone figured out how to specify the crop area for each image using MG? TV’s maybe? My only alternative that I know of is to not use MG and manually create documents with a normal image, and create my own cropped image using the editor. But I’d love to be able to use MG.
ahh, i hadn’t thought of that option, since uploads via MaxiGallery automatically creates the thumb. i thought it might cause problems. since I will not be the primary user (ie, the end user will not be technical) i may need to think about this some more, and whether MG will be the best solution. i may need to just use regular documents with two TV’s (thumb and normal). if i had the time, i’d probably add this feature to MG upload screen (x,y position of thumb) so you could manage the thumb size AND location with phpThumb.
thanks for the thread reference Photo.
I work with thumbnails all the time. How you want to address the thumbnail issue depends on each user and each site in question. Creating the thumbs by hand creates the best thumbs IMHO. But volume plays a major role here.
MaxiGallery is great. You can just let it do its thing while you upload photos. I then dug into the folder system and opened the correct folder so I could see the names of the thumbnails. Then I used Photoshop with the crop tool preset and custom cropped each image (at 75x75px for example) and then did a "save for the web" using the MaxiGallery produced thumbnail names (back into the correct folder). This sounds convoluted but it goes very fast once you get a rhythm going.
The upside is you get the thumbnail size and shape you want, all presented in neat rows and the thumbnail content is cropped EXACTLY the way you want them to look. If your original images have different sizes, orientation and shapes then automated thumbnail scripts will never completely produce the best thumbnail presentation. There are great scripts that work with setting X and Y coordinates but they can never deliver custom thumbnails like the human eye can...
Max
PS: if working with PHP scripts is daunting for the user, but the user has some experience or access to image editing software then its possible to record a macro batch process. I do this all the time with Photoshop. You record all the steps and save them as a group action. The results are not always as perfect as doing it one image a time, but it can be a time saver. I also trust Photoshop’s ability to resize and custom sharpen images to specific sizes. Sometimes I see images that get resized or sharpened on the fly by PHP scripts and they sometimes look a little "odd" to me.
