Album Thumbnail Generator
I needed to generate thumbnail images for some photos my wife took that I
placed on the website, so I could send a webpage link to someone else so she
could view the pages rather than me sending all of the images to her by email.
I also needed a program to not only create the thumbnail images, but to create
a webpage indexing all of the thumbnails and providing links from the
thumbnails to the full-size images.
I was in a hurry and didn't want to spend a lot of time setting up
software to do that nor spend a lot of time doing it manually.
I thought I had installed an easy-to-use program on the system several years ago
to do just that for a friend who wanted to post pictures of storm damage to
his house, but I couldn't remember the name of the program nor how to access
it. After looking on the system for his photos, I saw that I had used
a Perl program,
Album
by David Ljung Madison. He also offers a number of other free scripts at
his MarginalHacks website.
There's an example of the output from his photo album generator
script at DavePics.
Once I realized where the album Perl script was placed on my system, I was
able to generate the thumbnails and associated HTML pages by just running
the script while my working directory was the one in which the photos were
located. E.g. /path_to_script/album. An index.html page was
generated by the script containing all of the thumbnails, which are
placed in a tn directory beneath the one containing the
images. Clicking on a thumbnail then brought up a webpage containing the
full-size image and navigation links to the additional images.
I thought I should make a note to my self here, so that if I forget the
name of the program again, I have this blog entry to remind me of its
name and how to use it to generate image thumbnails and webpages for
the images.
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Xubuntu
I sometimes use a
Ubuntu Linux
live CD for troubleshooting issues with Microsoft Windows systems, since
a live CD allows me to boot the system from a CD without loading the Microsoft
Windows operating system on the hard drive. Or when I'm working at a site
without my own laptop, a live CD allows me to boot a system at the site without
fear that a system may be potentially infected with malware that might perform
keystroke logging
or might otherwise be monitored by someone remotely unbeknownst to the system's
owner.
I created a
Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop edition
live CD for booting a system so that I could
check on files on the system which had Microsoft Windows XP Home edition on
the hard drive. The system's owner reported she was having problems with
the system and I wanted to start with a quick look at some of the files on
the system and make a backup of her "My Documents" folder. I needed to open
Firefox on the system to check on some information online, but whenever I
opened a second tab in Firefox to Amazon.com, Firefox would crash. It also
crashed with only one tab open when I used Ctrl-Alt-F2 to obtain
a shell prompt with an error message indicating that there was a problem
with inadequate memory.
The system had a 3.2 GHz processor, but only 512 MB of memory and the
system requirements for Ubuntu Desktop Edition 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) listed on
the Ubuntu site were as follows:
- 1 GHz x86 processor (Pentium 4 or better)
- 512 MiB of
system memory (RAM)
- 5 GB of hard-drive space
- Graphics card and monitor capable of 800x600
- Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port (or both)
- Internet access is helpful
Since the system just met the minimum memory requirement for Ubuntu 11.04,
I decided to try
Xubuntu (pronounced "zoo-BOON-too"), instead. Xubuntu is a derivative of
Ubuntu, which uses the Xfce desktop environment, which requires less memory
than the
Unity desktop used by Ubuntu.
Xubuntu is a community developed, Ubuntu-based Linux operating
system that is well-suited for both laptops and desktops. It contains
all the applications you need - a web browser, document and spreadsheet
editing software, instant messaging and much more.
Minimum system requirements
You need 256 MB
RAM to run the Live CD or 256 MB
RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only requires you to have 64 MB RAM at
install time.
To install Xubuntu with the standard installer (Ubiquity), you
need 4.4 GB of free space
on your hard disk. The Alternate Install CD only requires you to have 2 GB of
free space on your hard disk.
Once installed, Xubuntu can run with starting from 256 (or even
just 192) MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least
512 MB RAM.
I downloaded
Xubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). I burned it to a CD and rebooted the
system with it. I found that I didn't have any problems when I opened
multiple tabs in Firefox under Xubuntu.
References:
-
Homepage | Ubuntu
-
Ubuntu
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
-
Xubuntu Home Page | Xubuntu
-
Xubuntu
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
-
DistroWatch.com:
Xubuntu
DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
-
Unity (user interface)
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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