by Guy Lerner
November 1, 2002
I love the simple things in life. You may think that’s stating the obvious, but in a world where complexity is king, “simple” is a rarity difficult to come by. That’s why, as a Web designer perplexed by the complexity of development tools meant to make my work “easier,” I was at best skeptical when asked to review the latest “this will make your work easier” version of Expresssoft’s Express Thumbnail Creator.
Probably the most common (again stating the obvious) chore of the budding Web designer-cum-enthusiast-cum-dabbler is creating picture galleries to share with friends and relatives online. Typically it’s an easy chore, a dip into basic HTML code or, if you own one of the more sophisticated image editing programs out there, a click or two on a built-in wizard.
The problem with creating galleries though is going past the mundane; everyone and his dog has a four-by-four grid of clickable thumbnails on a Web page. If you want to do something more complex (like changing the grid spacing and background colour, for instance, or making the thumbnails open full-size images in a new window), built-in wizards in megabucks graphics software like Photoshop can’t help you. They certainly don't make the process simple enough for all but serious designers to muck around with.
And so we’re back to square one trying to find a simple – but powerful – tool for getting picture galleries online in a snap.
Wizard magic
I usually take Wizards (those nifty step-by-step do-it-alls introduced way back when in the days of Windows 95) with a few pinches of salt when doing anything that requires more than a modicum of concentration, mostly because they’re meant to make things easy without having to concentrate. To do that they sacrifice all but the most basic of options when performing almost any task, from formatting a hard drive partition (at your peril) to creating a brochure in a word processor.
So when I saw that Express Thumbnail creator was a wizard-like tool for creating Web-based image galleries, I shrugged off any hope that it would offer me something new. As it turns out, I shrugged too soon.
Typical wizards give you a couple of choices (if you’re lucky) at each step of the process (for whatever it is you’re doing), and on the surface Express Thumbnail Creator does the same. But dig a little deeper, and the true power of the program reveals itself in riches of configurable options.
The interface is clean and uncluttered, and takes on the polished Windows XP look when run in XP (although the screenshots used here are from Windows 2000). The workflow is split up into five common-sense steps, beginning with “Project” (start a new project or load a saved project) and ending with “Finish”. In-between, the meat of the wizard is stacked up in the “Images”, “Options” and “Generate” windows, and that’s where the bulk of the program’s power is packed.
Step-by-step
Step past the Project window to the Images window and you’ll see what I mean. The screen is split into a few functional areas, allowing you to add the images you want displayed in your gallery by clicking on the green cross button sitting on a seemingly empty console in the bottom-right. You can add individual or multiple files or folders, so it’s simple to gather your images from the stocks sprinkled around your hard drive or network.
Once that’s done, the first sleigh-of-hand of the software is revealed as the “empty” console with the lonely green cross transforms itself into a fully-functional thumbnail sorting centre. Click on an image from the newly populated list and buttons for changing the image order, sorting the images in the list and rotating the thumbnails magically appear. It’s a neat trick too, allowing you to see only those tools you can use at any given time, which keeps the interface clean and, er, simple – but no less powerful. Above the console, a small preview window lets you see your changes as you make them.
Now that you have the raw material to work with (the images), the real work of making thumbnails from your images and linking them to the full-size originals on a Web gallery can begin.
The Options window gives you just that, rows and rows of options letting you tweak almost every aspect of your Web gallery’s appearance, style and coding. You can choose to live with the default settings (and have your four-by-four gallery ready in seconds), or you can fool around with the settings and make sure the gallery fits in with the style and context of your Website. You even have the option of entering your own HTML template, which Express Thumbnail Creator uses to render your gallery.
The only thing I really miss from this window is a preview option. I know it’s not too difficult to imagine how the final page will look and how the images will look when the thumbnails are clicked (and you can do so a few windows down the line), but it would be nice to be able to check that visually as every change is made to the options. Considering the embedded power in this window, this wouldn’t have been too difficult to add, and would set the program apart from other well-equipped automatic HTML generators.
One other weakness, while I’m griping, is the missing Index links in the help file. While the contents are all there, complete with a detailed step-by-step guide, trying to search for the “preview” option (in case I was just being stupid and looking it straight in the face) was a no-go.
Jitters aside, all is forgotten by the time you reach the Generate window. This “last” step breaks up the production of the gallery into four components. You can generate the full gallery (HTML, thumbnails and images), or just the thumbnails, images or HTML. This is more useful than it seems, because it means the program can be used simply as a thumbnail generator, and image link generator or an HTML coder, with the added "bonus" of combining all three into an image gallery. Cleverly, if you forgot to enter a key setting (like a destination folder for your gallery) in the previous step, the program automatically takes you back to the step with the cursor at the ready for you to enter the missing value.
(Small bug: on hitting the “next” button to get back to the Options window, the program generated an exception error, and I had to manually select the Options window tab to get back to it).
Once a gallery (or image or thumbnail) is generated, you can preview the HTML page in your default browser. It would have been good to have the option of viewing the gallery at different resolutions, but maybe I’m getting a bit greedy.
All that’s left to do is to save the project, which is the sole function of the Finish window.
Conclusion
Express Thumbnail Creator is probably the simplest Web gallery maker I’ve seen. It cuts out all the fluff that typifies other programs of its kind, but it also goes deeper than most to give you line-by-line control of your final production. As an HTML generator it’s useful, as a thumbnail creator equally so, and your money (about 40 bucks) is just about well spent for what you get.
Copyright © 2002