InstantThumbnails : Free Thumbnail Generator
That’s right, InstantThumbnails is a Free Thumbnail Generator! I wasted hours looking for a good thumbnail generator for a project I was working on. It didn’t take me long to realize that nothing existed that would do exactly what I wanted so I wrote InstantThumbnails to fulfill my own thumbnail generation requirements. I know others have the same needs, so I’m giving this free thumbnail generation tool away to help out like others all over the Internet do everyday when they give away their tools and knowledge.
In a nutshell, here’s what InstantThumbnails does:
Generate thumbnails FAST! – I needed to generate over 5000 thumbnails for a set of product photos, and this tool did it in about 45 seconds on my Pentium 4 3.0 ghz.
Designate source and target directories – I didn’t want anything to happen to my source photos. I didn’t want the generated thumbnails in the same folder with a prefix or suffix added to the filename, or with a new file extension. My need was to have the thumbnails in another folder, named exactly the same as the source photos.
Add a prefix and/or suffix to the generated thumbnail filename – One of the features I hated the most about some of the thumbnail generation tools I evaluated was that they forced a prefix or suffix on the generated thumb. This can be a useful feature, though, so I built it in, but I let you decide. You can choose to add a prefix to the beginning of the thumbnail filename or add a suffix to the end. You can do both! You can do neither! And, the generated thumbnail will have the same file extension as the file it comes from.
Maintain Thumbnail Aspect Ratio – I evaluated one tool that didn’t let me maintain the ratio between width and height of my thumbnail. I had to choose a dimension and go with it for all the thumbnails generated. Unless you’re making thumbnails of a solid color or a modern art project, this is pretty much useless because almost all of the thumbnails are skewed! InstantThumbnails lets you decide whether or not to keep the aspect ratio of the original photo.
Specify Height and Width of Thumbnails – almost every project uses a different size thumbnail, and InstantThumbnails allows you to specify your own thumbnail dimensions. When you want to maintain aspect ratio, you only specify height or width. If you specify both and choose to keep the aspect ratio, InstantThumbnails uses Height as the default dimension.
Create Thumbnails for Multiple Image Types – Instant Thumbnails uses the Microsoft .Net 1.1 GDI classes to generate thumbnails, so it should handle any image type that GDI supports. Automatically create thumbnails for jpg/jpeg, bmp, and gif files*. You specify the image types for which you want to create thumbnails.
* The original product I designed this for only used jpg files, so the other types are untested but should work in theory.
Requirements – InstantThmbnails should work on any computer running Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 or greater.