15-Minute Reviews :: Extreme Thumbnail Generator v1.9.4.0

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Extreme Thumbnail Generator version 1.9.4.0 by Extreme Internet Software – An application to create web galleries of your photos including thumbnails.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Extreme Thumbnail Generator is a powerful, yet easy to use software for creating online photo albums. It will let you make beautiful picture gallery with just a few mouse clicks! Even if you know nothing about the HTML and image processing – the result will be outstanding!

On the other hand, you have the full control over the look and feel of your pages – all gallery templates are plain HTML files, so you can easily customize them using the built-in template editor or your favorite HTML editor.

When the gallery is ready you can immediately upload it to a website using the built-in FTP publisher module.”

Quick Pros

• Easy four-step interface
• Ability for limited image alterations
• Plenty of built-in template
• HTML-based template builder
• Plenty of options

Quick Cons

• Description editor could use WYSIWYG interface
• Better template functionality would be good
• Processing seems a bit slow, even when choosing different filter
• No secure FTP support

Expansion

Overall this application is easy to use and fairly straightforward. I wouldn’t go so far as calling this a wizard-style interface (Mainly because it really isn’t – There is multiple tabs on the Options page and tons of options and settings on each page); Instead it is more of a four-step workspace. The first page is Images, which allows you to add your images, manipulate them and their order, and add descriptions to all your images. The second page is the gallery theme page. Here you will pick the name and destination of the gallery, as well as choosing the theme of the gallery; There is access to the theme manipulation here as well which I’ll touch on in a few. The third page has six tabs and this is just jammed full of options. Finally the last page is where you can generate, view and publish your gallery. The interface, even though offering a lot of features and options, is laid out very logically and is not overwhelming.

While I did like the idea of the descriptions being able to be added to each image, the description editor is essentially a raw text box, asking for HTML for any advanced functionality. While the application does automatically add line breaks for you in HTML and the ability to insert informational tags from the application itself, this is the extent for support here. I would have really liked to have seen a proper WYSIWYG interface here, at least for the long description.

An interesting feature of this application is that it can modify your images beyond size and rotation. Brightness/contrast, anti-alias, blur, noise as well as other effects make up the Image effects page; You can not only do one image at a time, but you can also apply a collection of effects first, and then work on finalizing your touches image by image as well.

The template functionality is quite interesting. Even though there is a good number of themes built in, you can take one theme, alter it and then Save As with it to create a whole new theme. The theme builder lays your components as well as default settings into separate pages to make managing your theme easier. The biggest downfall here may be that it is all in HTML with no WYSIWYG functionality. For beginners, creating a new theme may be difficult at best. While the templating functionality is nice, it is hard to manage these templates. With the templates being hidden away inside your Documents and Settings folder, it doesn’t get much easier to edit these themes. Managing the themes is also a bit complex, leaving you to use the menu to rename or delete themes.

When I made my way to the Options page, I was surprised at just now many options were available for the galleries themselves; While the template builder seems a bit weak, it does make up some of this by being powerful in the options department. There is options such as watermarks, shadows, resizing/recompressing, control over the folder and file names and much more. There is quite a bit here to work with.

When I did my first processing of 30 images into a gallery, I was surprised that the application was a bit sluggish building the gallery; I would have thought a few seconds at best and instead it took 1 minute and 20 seconds. I went back through and checked all the settings and I turned down the filters (From the default Lanczos to Linear) and retried the same process again. This time it took 1 minute and 6 seconds; A bit quicker, but still pretty slow, to what I am used to for speed. The resulting gallery worked well, and looked good in a few browsers, so I was quite pleased with the end results.

One more aspect that I was concerned with is the lack of Secure FTP support; With all of the cybercrime going on these days, applications really need to seriously look into adopting Secure FTP support as the default.

Final Verdict

While the application does have its quirks (Difficult template building for beginners and speed), the control over your galleries with this application are quite extensive. For free, this title wouldn’t be a bad one to grab if you plan on a web gallery in the near future and would like to try something different. As for paying $44.90 for this title, I would really want to see more WYSIWYG functionality and better template manipulation functionality before I would recommend this title.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, December 07, 2007