Thread

Hi, I’m new to EE and have just signed up for the 30 day trial. I’m a web designer, so if it works out I’ll be using EE for my own website as well as for potential clients’ sites. I may have a bunch of questions over the coming weeks as I work my way through the features, so any help would be appreciated!

First of all, the gallery module is important to me. I do quite a lot of band websites that can have anything up to 300 photos organised into various sections. I don’t need anything complex, it just needs to look good. I managed to get Lightbox2 working thanks to instructions in an old post on here, so I’m pretty happy about that!

One thing I can’t seem to do is use the gallery toolbox to create square thumbnails. It only seems to crop the original image without giving any option to create a cropped thumbnail and retain the original image. Is it possible to do this?

Alternatively, is there a third-party script I could use that would add this functionality? I’m no expert on PHP, but I know enough to copy/paste/tweak and if someone who’s done this before was will to post some basic instructions I’d probably work it out.

Worst case scenario - is it possible to create the thumbnails in Photoshop and upload them myself?

Thanks!

Fiona

No- you’ve pretty much figured out how the cropping works.  I believe there is a feature request for a cropped thumb option, but right now, it just crops the original.  And retaining the original and uploading cropped thumbs doesn’t work out all that well either.

What I’ve done where I really need this?  I’ll use php_thumb- and if I use php_thumb, then I’ll usually just go ahead and use the weblog module to handle my ‘gallery’.  PXLated has really done some nice sites this way- check this thread and there are others on the mechanics of it.

The negative- you can’t really try this method out on the hosted trial, as you can’t install php_thumb.  On the other hand, the Core version could be used on your own sever to test this approach out.

There are some other options, but they tend to be a bit more ‘codemonkey’.  For max flexibility with a fairly low learning curve?  A weblog and php_thumb might be the way to go.

Thanks for the fast response. I’ll definitely look into phpThumb or something similar - there’s a really simple script called PHP Thumbnailer which will hopefully do the job. I’ll try it out on my copy of the Core files. 😊