Huge Question about how to do Thumbnail Project

[agentjk]

Hi This is my question to anyone who can help.
I have about 800 pictures. I need to make sort of a catalog, of thumbnails, and I haven't come across any easy way to do that. I don't need the images to be big at all, but nothing I have come across allows me to do this in a time efficient manner. I have Photoshop 7 and Publisher 2002. I might have Illustrator. I am just looking for a way to throw up some small thumbnails (about 800 of them) on pages and type short captions under them. Any help would be great.

THanks JK

[Steve Rindsberg]

Have a look at BreezeBrowser (www.breezesys.com)

It'll do batch image size reductions, sharpening, and quite a few handy other tricks; it does a nice job of making HTML photo galleries as well, though it sounds as if you're more into printed pages. Not sure if it does that exactly, but it's worth a peek.

[Andrew B.]

I use ThumbsPlus to create this kind of thing. http://cerious.com/

[ElyseC]

I'll second Andrew's recommendation of ThumbsPlus. I've seen it in heavy use at my photographer's studio and my photog is extremely happy with it.

[Molly/CA]

I have about 800 pictures. I need to make sort of a catalog, of thumbnails,

THanks JK

I have about 8000 pictures --personal and my husband's site pictures for his work (biological consulting) and I would be dead long ago without ThumbsPlus. Its file handling is superb, for starters: a tree to the left of the thumbnail display, and you can drag pictures to other folders without losing your place in the open folder. Auto-rename, if you decide on a consistent naming scheme for any group of pictures. You can annotate files --and, when you are ready to print the catalogue, you can choose what to print with the thumbnails, so your "comment line" could be your annotation --or you can choose filename, date, etc. (Too much decreases the number of thumbnails to a page more than you'd think, though.)

You can choose the size of the thumbnails you want on the page (not pre-selects, you can type in the measurements and see how many will fit on the page on a preview sheet), the margins, the line spacing, and whether they will have borders. You can select pictures individually or print out a whole directory or tree.

There are also "contact sheets" which I've never explored, but they seem to be the same thing sent to a file.

One thing, if you're going to print out all that many pages it would be a good idea to spend some time arranging the pictures in folders with some logical framework. This is VERY easy to do with Thumbs Plus.

And no, they don't pay me. I pay them every so many years, as they upgrade. (They're quite generous with free upgrades, or have been in the past.

TP goes far beyond a picture collection --the range of file types it handles is boggling.