PixiePlus Users Guide: Section 1.11
Web Image Galleries
What are Web Image Galleries?
PixiePlus allows users to easily create HTML pages and thumbnail previews
of all their images in order to use on the Web. This is done by selecting
"Make Web Image Gallery" from the "File" menu.
This feature is highly configurable and includes many options - so many that
there is a whopping 8 page wizard in order to configure them. Don't worry,
though. Even the the wizard is big all the options contain sensible defaults
and you can select "Finish" any time to use the current settings.
The Web Image Gallery Wizard
Since all the pages in the wizard contain their own descriptions the guide
will only briefly go over what is on each page.
- Thumbnail and grid size.
Here you may specify both the sizes for the thumbnails and the grid size.
The grid size is used in "grid" style image galleries. For the frame-based
thumbnail view only the rows option is used. Also important to note is that
a combobox containing the standard thumbnail sizes is provided. If you use
a standard thumbnail size and have already generated previews for the browser,
PixiePlus can reuse those thumbnails when creating the HTML gallery. This
speeds things up, especially when there are a large amount of images.
- Thumbnail style options
You may configure thumbnails to look a variety of ways. Supported styles are
no borders, solid or beveled borders, Liquid style, or round corners. You
have a preview dialog very similiar to the borders
batch effect dialog with a few differences. First of all, since all the
buttons should be the same size in some cases there is an additional button
fill color option. Second of all, if round corners is selected the color will
always match whatever you selected for the HTML background color.
- HTML style options
This controls what kind of style is used for your image gallery. Currently
four styles are supported:
- Grid Layout.
This is the default style and provides
a grid of thumbnails.
- Grid Layout, image in new window
This is the same
as the above, except displays images in a new window.
- Thumbnail column frame and view frame
This is a
frame-based style that shows thumbnails in a frame on the left
and an image viewing window on the right. If a banner ad is selected it
is displayed in a frame on the top. Also note that with this style
the number of thumbnails per page is specified by setting the
"Rows per page" option on the "Thumbnail and grid size" page. The
columns option is ignored.
- Image list frame and view frame(no thumbnails)
This
is another frame-based style like above, but instead of providing
thumbnails on the left frame it only provides a list of images. It
is mainly intended for low-bandwith commercial sites that want to
present images to the user but don't want to spend bandwidth on
thumbnails. In this case, the image list is not broken into pages
but is displayed all at once.
You also may configure various other options here like if to use a border for
grid style galleries and if to include the image filenames.
- HTML color options
Here you can set the HTML colors for the background and different link types.
The default is Konqueror/IE-like colors.
- Navigation buttons
The navigation buttons are highly configurable. On this page you can select
if you want to use a "Home" button, and provide custom text or images for
the "Next" and "Back" buttons.
- Banner ad
PixiePlus allows you to automatically use banner ads, which appear centered
on top of the thumbnails in all styles. If you wish to use this feature you
specify the image to use and where it should point to here. If your using
a frame-based style you also need to specify the height for the frame here.
- Web page title
Here you can set the title for your image galleries. This is displayed in bold
text on top of the thumbnails.
- Output filename
This sets the output filename prefix used when generating files. For example,
using the default value of "thumbnails", 1 page of output would create
"thumbnails.html", while 3 pages of output would create "thumbnails.html",
"thumbnails2.html", "thumbnails3.html".
Notes on index.html.
If you wish the first page to always be the special "index.html" file simply
change the output filename from the default of "thumbnails" to "index".
Files created for the image gallery and how to use them.
Once the image gallery is created you need to place the new files on your
web site if you want other people to be able to view it. You may do this
either by dragging and dropping the new files to an FTP site with Konqueror
and Pixie or by using one of the many FTP programs available for Unix and KDE.
You will need to copy both the generated HTML files and the thumbnails. The
HTML files will all start with the prefix specified by the "Output filename"
option in the wizard, so if you used the default settings you should have
a "thumbnails.html" file and possibly "thumbnails2.html", "thumbnails3.html",
etc... depending on how many images there are, what the grid size is, and
if you selected a frame based style.
The thumbnails are all prefixed by "thb_" and you will need to copy those
to the same directory you put the HTML pages.
Some examples
Examples of the different HTML and thumbnail styles are available in
Appendix 4.4
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