Blog - Mass Thumbnail Generation Woes

Mass Thumbnail Generation Woes

Location: Blogs Living in Software Development
Posted by: host	10/14/2006 10:14 PM
I am burning the midnight oil lately trying to get www.lowcountrygeologic.com converted over to my DotNetNuke Store module and it is time to convert the pictures. The old site dynamically generated thumbnails, but the new one uses a thumbnail on the file system to speed up operations. The trouble is that Lowcountry Geologic has over 5500 images, and I had to generate a thumbnail for each of them on the server. There is no way I am downloading that much data, and even if I did, my image editing software will only let me process 40 images at a time.. My first idea was to find a free thumbnail generator. A quick Google search revealed many options. I downloaded each of them, and one by one I found a reason why none of them would work for me. One of them overwrote my source images. Another of them forced me to change the file extension. Others added a prefix or suffix to the thumbnail. Another one wouldn't let me choose the size of the resulting thumbnails. One of them didn't even have an option to maintain the aspect ratio so all the resulting thumbnails were skewed. And there were several programs that didn't work at all. Of all the software packages I found, the only one was actually useful was a tutorial on creating thumbnails using the Microsoft .Net framework. I spent a few hours trying to tweak it for my purposes, but I gave up when I found out it used a custom control to display source and target images, for which no source was given. I could have lived with that had the control not gagged on only 250 photos! Having endured hours on end of failure and frustration, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I'm a programmer, and I know how to manipulate images programmatically. I'm going to build my own application to do exactly what I want. It sucks that I wasted so much time looking for a tool that should be easy to find, but I'm sure in the end I'll be happy I decided to roll my own.

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