Self-cleaning carpets

[Karen G. Schneider]

I spent some time yesterday looking over both ThumbsPlus 4 and Media Center
Plus 3.  Per several requests, I will summarize.

If you are producing images plus thumbnails for a website, and want
automatically-generated HTML, ThumbsPlus 4 is excellent.  It produces
reasonable HTML, and does the deed very quickly.

Media Center Plus generates very peculiar HTML--gobs of Javascripty stuff in
an elaborate screen show I didn't really want.

If it's just uniform, sensibly-named thumbnails you are after, and plan to
do your own webberizing, both seem to do a credible job.

Both products had really fun capabilities, such as excellent renaming tools.
ThumbsPlus 4 has a great database tool.  Media Center Plus is painless, and
its thumbnail viewer is aesthetically pleasing; Thumbs Plus errs on the side
of features and overall capability, and hooks nicely to Access.

Media Center Plus has nice slide show capabilities--if you don't care about
captions.  Thumbs Plus 4 will display a teensy caption--I tried enlarging
the font, but there are many, many options and never did find it, if it
exists.

Both packages can hook to image programs.  However, what neither package
seems to do (at least competently or consistently) is actually batch-process
original images themselves in addition to the thumbnails.  So in other
words, as far as I could see, I would still need to preprocess the images
with products such as Paint Shop Pro--not hard to do, of course.

Based on its ease of use and rock-bottom cost, I'm going to get Media Center
Plus for several workstations where staff are constantly rummaging through
large piles of images for our website, and am considering Thumbs Plus 4 for
a project where we really get our act together and organize these images.
Neither product will really do what I'm looking for, but both would be
valuable additions...

Karen G. Schneider kgs at bluehighways.com
Assistant Director, Shenendehowa Public Library, NY
http://www.shenpublib.org