NAME
cthumb - a themable web picture album generator
SYNOPSIS
cthumb -c [options] imagefile ... > file.album
cthumb [options] file.album
DESCRIPTION
Cthumb creates themable web picture albums with thumbnails of all the
pictures, comments for each picture, etc. Cthumb allows you to create
web picture albums, i.e. collections of digital pictures, with small
thumbnails of your pictures and with captions. In addition, it allows
you to have several views of the collection of pictures. An album is
composed of a series of pages, each composed of a collection of
pictures. For each album page may optionally have two or more versions,
like for instance in English, Spanish, German, French, etc. So your
visitors would go into the English version of the web album, into the
Spanish version, etc.
Typically (this is what I use it for and why I wrote the program), you
accumulate lots and lots of digital pictures and you need to label them
and sort them out. Perhaps also you have friends and family that speak
different languages. This program lets you very easily make picture
albums and have the same pictures labelled in one or more languages.
You can customize almost everything in the way the albums look on the
screen, from the size of the thumbnails to the background and
foreground colors, the border colors, whether you want film-strips and
their picture, etc.
OPERATION
Cthumb has two modes of operation. The first one, which is active when
option -c is specified, prints an album file, via stdout, comprising
all the images given as arguments to the command line. This is the
first thing you need to do if you have never tried this program before,
just to get you started. Once you have an album file, you edit it and
put comments to the pictures, titles to the album pages, etc. In this
mode, all the provided options in the command line will be passed
through to the album file. See the format of the album file in section
ALBUM FILES below.
The second mode is the regular mode, the one that actually creates web
pages, given the album file, so it is the one that does the real work
of the script. Given an album file, cthumb generates web pages
containing picture albums and an index with links to all the albums
generated.
Cthumb creates several HTML files, one per "Page" in the album.
Check the README file (probably in /usr/doc/cthumb*/README) for more
detailed info.
OPTIONS
-c <files> Create an album file with the files listed and spit it out
in stadard out.
-l <n> Do pages in <n> languages.
-f <n> Go into film mode (<n> thumbnails per row).
-r Force re-generation of all thumbnails (slow).
-x <n> Make thumbnail width <n>.
-y <n> Make thumbnail height <n>.
-n In film mode, don’t generate the strips.
-m Don’t generate a main index file.
-k Generate text captions under the thumbnails.
-t Check the thumbnail width/height from the thumbnail image
itself. This is slow.
-b Put the bytes of the main picture in the caption.
FILES
By default cthumb creates the following files (foo being the name of
the album file):
foo-index.html The table of contents.
ALBUM FILES
Album files have a simple, textual format. First, comments in the file
are started by the # character and last to the end of the line. The
best way to find out the format is to use the -c <files> option for
album creation mode, which outputs an album file in stdout.
PER-USER VARIABLES
cthumb allows users to have their own variable settings in
$HOME/.cthumbrc which is read and interpreted by perl. If perl cannot
parse the file, cthumb will complain rather dryly that there is a parse
error in the file.
VERSION
This is cthumb version 4.2.
The latest version of cthumb can be found at this URL:
http://puchol.com/cpg/software/cthumb/
AUTHOR
The main author Carlos Puchol <cpg@nospam.puchol.com>. A couple of
other people around the net contributed to this program. See the
AUTHORS file.
LICENSE
This program is released under the GNU GPL license.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright by Carlos Puchol, 1999, 2001. Warranty: the usual. No
guarantee whatsoever is provided. No liability whatsoever is accepted
for any loss or damage of any kind resulting from any defect or
inaccuracy in this information or code.
SEE ALSO
perl(1), pnm(5), djpeg(1), rdjpgcom(1), cjpeg(1)
BUGS
Option -r regenerates all thumbnails as the program sees them, i.e.
one per language. If a picture is listed twice in the album, it will be
generated double the amount of times. If you have a lot of thumbnails,
this can get lengthy. A workaround is to delete the thumbnails you want
re-generated and run cthumb without the -r option.