last update: Fri Feb 02 2003

What's new ?

MakeThumbs has a new option, -s, which tells it to put each contact sheet into a separate html file and put a menu at the top of each html file, from which all the other html files can be reached directly. This has become necessary since some of the image collections, that I am administering myself, meanwhile exceed 1800 images in a single subdirectory. Even at 7x11 thumbsnails per contact sheet that gives 24 or more contact sheets, which takes an eternity to load. I tried it out, it works great and is MUCH faster than the old solution. Give it a try.
Also, in addition to GIF and PPM images, Makethumbs can now read 16-bit BMP images. This new feature came "for free", since I had to extend the image reading routine anyway, because there does not seem to be any standard linux or windows software able to translate these (xv will only report an error, convert will mess up the colors, Windows Paint and Windows Internet Explorer will SHOW the image correctly, but cannot save it as anything else). The latest versions up to 1.76, mainly contains adaptations that became neccessary due to changes in the alphabet-module. Also two users had problems due to the specific compilers they were using, so 1.76 is more generic and can handle these cases.
The 1.8x versions contain mainly internal remodelling and improved error handling.

Installation

How to proceed

MakeThumbs is distributed as a zip- or gzip-ed tar-archive. Both (g)tar and (un)zip should be installed on any UNIX-based operating system. If you do not have either of them on your system, do a search for them on the web, there are several pages, depending on the operating system you use, which have them, or ask your system administrator or the distributer of your system software.
Create the directory in which you want MakeThumbs to reside, copy the archive into that directory and change into it. Then unpack the archive by typing: 
tar xzvf MakeThumbs-182.tgz
or 
gtar xzvf MakeThumbs-182.tgz
for a tar-gzip-archive or 
unzip MakeThumbs-182.zip
for a zip-archive. The directory will then contain the following eighteen files:
Next, you have to adjust a few default settings for MakeThumbs. Load "MakeThumbs.cpp" into an editor (e.g. "emacs MakeThumbs.cpp"). You then have to adjust at most three lines, starting line 37.
  1. Line 37: #define CJPEG "/usr/bin/cjpeg"
    If you have "cjpeg" installed on your machine (most likely you will, it is standard software for most Linux systems), replace "/usr/bin/cjpeg" with the path of the "cjpeg" program on your hard-disk. If you do not have "cjpeg", comment this entry out by placing a "//" before the line. That will tell "MakeThumbs.cpp" to use "convert" (see below) to encode jpeg-images instead, which is about 10 times slower, though.
  2. Line 38: #define CONVERT "/usr/X11R6/bin/convert"
    Only relevant, if you do NOT have "cjpeg": Replace "/usr/X11R6/bin/convert" with the path of the "convert" program on your hard-disk. If you do not have "convert", either, just comment this line out, too. MakeThumbs will then create the thumbnail sheets as ".ppm" files, which it can write directly. You can then later manually convert the thumbnail images into another, more compact format, if you wish to.
  3. Line 39: #define defaultFontPath "/home/compuman/bin" // for font
    Replace "/home/compuman/bin" with the name of the directory in which the font-files "alphabet.courier" and "alphabet.times" reside. Usually this will be the directory into which you installed MakeThumbs, but if you wish, you can place them in another directory of your hard-disk, too.
The rest of "MakeThumbs.cpp" should remain unchanged - you can always experiment with it, later, if you want to.

Next, load "graphics.h" into an editor (e.g. "emacs graphics.h"). You then have to adjust the following two lines, starting line 13.
  1. Line 16: #define DJPEG "/usr/bin/djpeg"
  2. Line 21: #define DTIFF "/usr/X11R6/bin/convert"
In both cases the path specifications at the end have to be modified in such a way, that they point to the locations of "djpeg" and "convert" respectively. If you do not have these programs installed on your computer, you can still compile MakeThumbs, just comment the respective line(s) out. If you do not have "convert", MakeThumbs will not be able to read TIFF files - they are rather rare, so that does not really do much harm - if you do not have "djpeg", though, JPEG files cannot be read. Since they make up about 95% of all image files in the internet, you should first organize & install "djpeg" and then continue with the installation of MakeThumbs afterwards.

Finally, you have to compile MakeThumbs. To do this, simply type "make".

If make terminates normally, MakeThumbs is now ready for use.
Otherwise it will print out an error message. In this case, unless you are able to resolve the problem yourself, email me the output produced by make plus the output of the following three statements and I will try to locate and solve the problem.

Once MakeThumbs has been successfully compiled, you can delete all of the above files apart from "alphabet.courier" and "alphabet.times", the rest is not needed anymore.

Download the MakeThumbs-archive (ZIP, TGZ) or go back to the Unix section ?


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