Sketch Blog
Vivid and inviting colors, blended with carefully crafted designs. Exciting and visually appealing illustrations, with those little extras that makes you smile.
Making better thumbnails
Posted on April, 20 2008 at 09 PM
During a recent project, I came across the problem of creating a number image gallery thumbnails at a specific size and saving them into the appropriate folders. Sounds easy, right? There should obviously be a great third-party Mac OS X app already out there for this, right?
Apparently not. I mean, there was at one time a great app that I was using to create my thumbnails, but between Mac transfers and not needing that particular functionality, I seem to have lost track of it. I even spend a couple of hours this weekend trying out all the shareware applications that came up in my searching of Macupdate. No luck, though.
Without a dedicated tool (or even a pre-built Photoshop automation), I had to settle for creating a custom Photoshop action. The final product (which is available on my Pownce postings) is a near-perfect droplet that will nicely produce meaningful, consistent thumbnails, with a tiny footprint. The source images do need to be at least 400px to 500px wide, but the only real drawback is that the limitations of the Photoshop “Save for Web” dialog doesn’t allow for complete processing and file re-naming. That part you will need to do yourself. But don’t worry, the time saved and the output thumbnails are worth the effort.
For the sake of discussion and posterity, why not take a look at some of the elements that I found missing from any of the current thumbnail generating applications/actions: