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Creating Thumbnail pages in IrfanView:

Thumbnail pages are useful for giving visitors a fast-downloading preview of your pictures, so they can decide which larger images they'd like to view in large form. Thumbnail pages can be constructed by hand, using tables in FrontPage, using the gallery tool in FrontPage 2002, or an automated tool. IrfanView provides such a tool, as does Photoshop.

Before beginning, make sure your images are in JPG, GIF, or PNG format so they will be visible in any Web browser.

1. Open IrfanView.



2. Choose File -> Thumbnail, or simply press T - the keyboard shortcut. A new window will open, as shown below:

   

3. Choose the thumbnails that you'd like to include on your gallery page. You can use the Ctrl and Shift keys to select multiple files, or draw a box around the desired files with your mouse.



4. Choose File -> Save Selected Thumbs As HTML File

   

5. Choose options and set the title of the page (this can be left blank, if desired) in the dialog box that appears.

   

   Use an empty folder as the destination folder, and make sure the "Copy original images to destination folder" option is checked, so that the original image is available when the user clicks on the thumbnail. Then click OK.

6. The page will be called "Thumbnails.html". Open it in your Web browser to preview the results. When a user clicks on a thumbnail, the original image will open in a new browser window.

   

7. Import this page, and all the images it produces, into a folder in your web, using the standard FrontPage File -> Import menu (or, as a shortcut, drag the folder from Windows Explorer into the proper location in FrontPage Folder List). Change the name of the page, the background color from gray to your preferred color, if desired, and make any other needed changes with FrontPage.

TIP: A proof sheet can also be made from IrfanView's thumbnail gallery also, to do this, select "File -> Create contact sheet from selected thumbnails." This will create a single large file on a black background with the selected thumbnails on it. This is useful when printing samples of images, but not for the Web, as a single large graphic is very slow to download.