[Web4lib] seeking software for putting photographs on the web

[Thomas Dowling]

On 8/14/2006 2:19 PM, Jonathan Gorman wrote:

> One difficulty, we are encountering is that when creating thumbnails, we
> can standardize the width of the images or the height of the images but
> not both.


Are you sure you want to do that?  If the images don't all have the same
aspect ratios, shoehorning the thumbnails into a standard height *and*
width will require you either to distort or crop the images.  IMO, you
really don't want to distort them, and I don't think I'd trust software
to crop out a certain size rectangle and hope it was a sensible choice
for a thumbnail.  I'd set a standard height and let the width vary.

That said, you could set up a Photoshop macro that set the image size to
a specified height and then cropped the canvas size to a specified width
(or vice versa).  With a little tinkering I'm sure you could script this
with the ImageMagick command-line tools also, if you have them.  If you
wanted a 100px-high thumbnail cropped to the middle 80px of the image,
width-wise, I think you can get that with:

  convert -resize 100x100 -gravity Center \
    -crop 80x100+0+0 foo.jpg bar.png


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu