I find myself loathing the process of uploading another set of images for my photos weblog.  I have to go through the process of creating the thumbnail for each.  It’s time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone.  (But still better than fooling with an image editor.)

I’m looking at ways to do the conversions in batch on my client and then FTPing everything up, completely sidestepping the EE upload facility.

I would rather a one-step batch upload feature that auto-populates multiple weblog entries with one full image and one thumbnail per image uploaded.  Of course, it’ll have to be clever about what images go where, as the obvious thing to do might be too restrictive—suppose someone needs to do something other than one full/thumb per entry.

... just to get you guys thinking ...

~joe

BTW, sometimes my uploads work, and sometimes they don’t.  It might have something to do with the image editor I use to size and crop the full-size image.  Maybe GD2 is too sensitive to some aspect of the image format.  I used ImageMagick for a while but was unimpressed with its jpeg compression algorithm—images were too fat.

jtlapp - I use a very inexpensive tool to automate creating thumbnails.
It’s called PhotoCleaner - it cost all of US$12.95. I bought it 5 minutes after downloading the demo.

Another great tool for batch processing is GraphicConverter for MacOS X.  I have been using GraphicConverter since back to the days of CompuServe and their shareware purchasing options, pre-world wide web!

You can easily select a directory of images, and quickly specify just about anything you can manually do in the application and quickly having it scream through thousands of images.  Most new Apple systems come with a full version installed in the Applications directory.

Have used it a lot over the years to create thumbnails of huge batches of images for a variety of projects.

Figured I would throw it in the thread just in case some one was looking for a MacOS application to do this.

Sue, PhotoCleaner looks absolutely fantastic.  I wanted to download it, but it only runs on Windows.  I have a Windows laptop, but I work from my high-powered Mac.  Besides, I’ve developed a severe allergy to Windows.  I have a conniption every time it does.

Nevin, I didn’t know this monster was on my computer!  I have Mac OS X.  Pouring through the docs and browsing the UI, I feel totally overwhelmed.  I know it’s all there, but the learning curve looks steep.  For what it does, I’d better investigate.

After some googling around, I discovered iView MediaPro.  The simplicity of the user interface blows me away.  I initially thought it was too simple for my needs, but every time I think of something I want to do, I quickly find an intuitive way to do it.  I have never seen so much power hidden behind such a simple, intuitive interface.  I can even do batch operations.

Okay, I’d rather have a simple pipeline for batch operations, the way PhotoCleaner does.  I know I can do it with AppleScript, but I’d rather have a simpler way.  Haven’t looked for one yet—maybe it’s there.  PhotoCleaner gave me the idea.

Main drawback: it’s $200.  But you get to play with a fully functional trial version for 21 days.

Thank you Sue and Nevin!

~joe

I believe most new Mac systems come with it as both my Powerbook 12” and new G5 towers all had GraphicConverter in the Applications folder.  There are a number of great little 3rd party applications that Apple throws in the Applications folder that are wonderful!

Good luck.

Another great tool for this, and I use it on all my images, is PhotoSite TimeSaviour . Creates thumbnails, has incredible functionality for creating your html, etc. I am not sure how it would do at your desire to populate images thumb/full per weblog entry, and it is donationware, I believe. In fact, I have looked at my copy of iViewMediaPro, and I’m not sure how I would do that with iVMP either. However, I also use Graphic Converter, and have for years. It is an incredible tool for a reasonable price.