In the May 2013 My Apps installment, I mentioned that I had stopped using Easy Thumbnails, the software it described, in 2012 but I did not identify what replaced it. Now, roughly eighteen months after that post and more than two years after I started using it, I’m finally getting around to talking about my “new” thumbnail maker, FastStone Image Viewer.

First some background. I use uniform dimensions for all thumbnail and full size photos on my site. For extremely well thought out and indisputable reasons, full size photos are currently 800 x 600 pixels and thumbnails are 100 x 100 pixels. Because I’ve chosen to use square thumbnails, a little extra editing is required to extract a sensible looking square from a rectangular shaped full size photo. I use PhotoPlus to produce both the full size 800 x 600 jpeg and the square jpeg for the thumbnail. There is no fixed size for the square as it will eventually be resized to standard dimensions. The full size photo gets a watermark style copyright notice applied.

Originally, both the thumbnail re-sizing and the addition of the copyright were done inside PhotoPlus. Sometime near the start of this century, I started doing the thumbnails with Fooke Software’s Easy Thumbnails but continued doing the copyright with PhotoPlus using the software’s macro facility to apply the customized text to a set of photos in a single operation.

Then one day it broke. It didn’t just break by itself, of course. It broke when I installed a new version of PhotoPlus. The recording of macros simply did not work in the new release. I contacted support who verified the problem and logged it. They also helped me move my previously recorded copyright macro to the new software which would take care of things until the end of the year, when the date would need changing, or the bug was fixed. I started using FastStone’s product long before year’s end and don’t know if the bug ever was fixed.

Like Easy Thumbnails, FastStone Viewer is a whiz at batch processing. The long list of supported functions includes the ability to add text or graphic watermarks. I use text which is really easy to change when a new year rolls around. I can even change it temporarily when I occasionally use a photo someone else has taken.

FastStone Viewer also supports re-sizing and it wasn’t long before I started using it to create thumbnails. As I said previously, I had no issues whatsoever with Easy Thumbnails. But Viewer also does a fine job of re-sizing and, since I was already using it for adding copyright notices, I decided to kill two birds with one FastStone. I now use PhotoPlus to create the individual files then fire up FastStone Viewer and, with two quick passes, have a set of properly sized thumbnails and watermarked full size images.

My Apps – Chapter 7 — FeedForAll