15-Minute Reviews :: Express Thumbnail Creator v1.81

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Express Thumbnail Creator version 1.81 by Neowise Software – An application to quickly create thumbnails from images for web galleries and such.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Express Thumbnail Creator makes it easy to create professional-looking online photo album with a few mouse clicks! Just add your images to the list, click a few buttons and watch your new web gallery come alive!

All the galleries created with Express Thumbnail Creator are ready to be published on the web, so you can immediately upload them to your website. Share your family, vacation, personal and other photo albums with your friends!

You can use default settings or pre-built templates to create stunning pages. Or you can spend some time to customize look and feel of your gallery. You have total control over every tiny detail of your web gallery!

Express Thumbnail Creator recognizes all popular image formats (jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, png, etc.). You can also save the templates you created and reuse them later.”

Quick Pros

• Wizard-style interface generally easy to use
• Built-in themes nice but not a lot
• Capability to modify themes all the way down to source handy

Quick Cons

• Images page is very weak
  • No drag and drop support
  • Awkward to manipulate images
  • Default crop alignment is Top/Left
• Does not prompt you to save altered theme
• No (Secure) FTP client or other options to handle final project
• Processing is slower than I would hope

Expansion

When you launch this application, you are greeted by a 6-step wizard interface. Each of the steps are logically laid out. Starting with Project, the application allows you to choose to create a new project or open an existing project. The Images step is where you add all of the images, as well as give them titles, crop alignment and rotation if needed. The third step, Theme, is where you can choose one of the pre-made themes to start your design from. Options, step four, is where you can get into changing the theme around entirely. The Generate step is where you can now build your gallery, and then view the resulting gallery or open the folder in which it was created in. Finally, the Finish step you can choose to save the project. I think this could have been rolled into the Generate step due to the fact that there is no other options.

The best part of this application is the capability to build (or completely rebuild) a theme. While the application has 29 different themes, there could be more themes. This is where the Options page comes into effect. On the Options page, you can modify a significant number of options directly through the 7 sub-steps here, or you can even choose to go directly into the source of the files, including the index page, image page and the CSS. With no extra themes apparently available on the site, you may want to do this for a unique feel. For the skilled user, you could even go into the Themes folder and alter the images as well and create your own theme preview image.

With that said, there is some weak points in the application. The biggest weak point in my opinion is the Images step in the wizard. The entire process of handling the images is awkward at best. First off, there is no drag and drop support for adding new files, and reorganizing via drag and drop can be just as awkward because of the lack of hints on what will happen when you do it, though you’ll catch on quick I suppose. I also found the process of manipulating the files were awkward at best. I’m not sure why we would have to use Control+Delete to delete an item, when just Delete would suffice; The same goes for rotating and reorganizing. As well, there is for some reason no keyboard shortcut for Crop Alignment (Even taking the ‘hint’ character on the title, Alt-C/Control-C does not work either), forcing you to manually tab to the location or click on the drop down and choose the Crop Alignment. This wouldn’t be so bad normally, but the application defaults to Top/Left instead of Center each time, essentially forcing you to change most of the crops. I feel that this should have maybe been altered into a two-step process, Add Images, and Edit Images (Or something similar), where Edit Images would be an interface built on speed using keypresses to quickly change all the settings rather than a time-consuming process this way may become.

A few other quirks I did have with this application was the fact that when I did change the Theme, the application did not prompt me to save my changes to the theme as a new theme or to the old theme. While it is easy to save the theme in the File menu, you must remember to do this on your own or lose all your changes.

Another concern I do have is that there is no extra functionality for working with the resulting file. There’s no Secure FTP (or even FTP) functionality here, nor a CD-burning function (Though for some reason there is the ability to create an autorun.inf file), no email. Just the ability to save the project, and preview or open the existing folder. This means you will always have to break out another application just to finish the project, and for people more new to the process, this may be a challenge.

Final Verdict

While the application overall works pretty good and the ability to modify themes significantly is quite powerful, the fact that it would be awkward to do large galleries, both in editing the image properties and the speed of actual processing. For free, this may be an application to try out to see if it suits your needs. As for paying $40 for this application, I feel this application needs some maturing and added features before I feel it may be worth this price. There are a lot of alternatives out there, including the built-in Photoshop Automation Tool, Web Photo Gallery. There is also the popular freeware title JAlbum featuring a large collection of community-provided skins (themes) here.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, October 08, 2007