YAT - Yet Another Thumbnailer
Another thumbnailer?
YAT is an application that basically generates thumbnails out of an existing picture collection. In addition, it creates "web safe" pictures. Pictures taken with a digital camera are oftenly very high resolution (I'm talking about real digital cameras, not phonecams or webcams). Something like 2800x2100 is not uncommon. These need to be scaled down to be displayed on the web. Publishing these gigantic pictures on the web is simply "not done".
YAT is capable of generating both thumbnails (usually 160x120 pixels in size) as well as what we call, the "normals". The normals are the scaled down versions of your original pictures, and are usually 800x600 pixels in size. Note that your original pictures can be published in addition to the thumbnails and the normals. And thus, the original pictures will never be modified.
What else?
YAT doesn't just generate thumbnails and normals. It does much more than that. The second step after generating thumbnails and normals, is to generate HTML index pages. You can define how many thumbnails can be on a page, or you can set YAT to put all thumbnails on one page. After that YAT will generate "image pages", which are pages which belong to each individual normal picture.
The third and final step can be one of three options: YAT can either upload the whole gallery to an FTP folder (multiple proxy configurations supported), YAT can copy the gallery to another folder (like a network share), or YAT can open the gallery for you in your favorite browser. You can also just cancel and do nothing.
Other features
- YAT supports JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP files. Note that thumbnails and normals will always be JPEGs.
- You can describe images by just typing a description next to the filename. These descriptions can be found in the HTML pages, so you can put something funny or something serious in there. Whatever you need.
- A project can be saved and loaded again. If you've entered 274 descriptions, a nice prologue and a dramatic epilogue, you're going to want to store that securely in a file.
- The images shown in the list can be previewed by just selecting one of them. The property-tabs will be replaced by a preview that resizes the image (in low quality, for optimum speed) in realtime.
- The previewer will cache-ahead images. When an image in the list gets a background (yellow for JPEG, green for GIF, red for PNG, blue for BMP) that means it's in the cache, so that previewing that image will be lightning fast.
- The interface of YAT is customizable and will be stored in the registry. You can even flip the property-tabs and the file list!
Technical chatter
YAT depends on Microsoft's MSXML 3.0 engine, because of its support for XSLT. XSLT is used to turn templates into HTML index and image pages, so it's extremely customizable. If of course, you have the technical know-how of XSLT and XHTML. XHTML is the target of the XSLT engine, because XHTML is theoretically still XML. Of course, the XHTML needs to be valid, so that YAT can search for additional files that belong to the target XHTML, such as CSS files, or static images. Beside that, the thumbnails are generated with a fast halftone algorithm, which stands for high quality scaling down of images. The engines for loading JPEG, GIF and PNG are built into YAT, so you don't need any external DLL's for that.
System requirements
YAT will require the following things from your computer:
- A computer running Windows 2000 or later (x64 Editions included).
- High color or true color display setting.
- MSXML 3.0 must be installed.
- For update-checking, a working internet connection (proxies not supported).
Download
Now, you may download YAT by clicking the link below. It's a self-installing executable. If your browser blocks such files, check your internet settings first.
Disclaimer: this product is freeware and provided as-is. I cannot be held liable for any damage or other costs that might arise from the usage of this product. For details, see the license within the installer.
YAT 1.01 (01/02/2006 - 1,461KB)