Presenting a Library or Vignette of Images

This describes the process used in qkw systems for cataloguing images or for presenting a vignette. This process is under development to provide for all the desired options. It is illustrated with Rorie's wedding.

Basic principles.

• "Primary images", also called "web images", are of a size to give prominence on a page. Height is on the only dimension worth controlling (because there is usually plenty of screen width). Preferred height (by Carl) is 360 pixels. He used to use 350 pixels, but now prefers 360 as a 3x multiple of 120. Rorie's wedding is presented at 240 pixels of height because that is what Barry's images were. "Primary images" can appear in any folder in any path. (Bill Parke adds "I agree with 360 pixels as a desirable height limit for Web page images. For my St.Aug pages I also tried to control entire image sizes to make both dimensions evenly divisible by 8, which should produce optimal JPEG files without wasted space (JPEG algorithms deal with 8x8 units and pad to this dimension (next higher) if the image is not an exact fit.)
• It is useful to have thumbnails available. These are stored in a sub-folder called "\t". The height I prefer is 120 pixels, but other people often use smaller thumbnails, say 80 pixels of height.
• While "Source Art" is too big to be uploaded to the web, it is useful to save in a convenient place so future improvements to images can be made from the original uncompressed image. "Source Art" is stored in a sub-folder called "\SourceArt". This folder should never be uploaded to the web.
• Text to be placed at the top of any webpage can be stored in a .txt file with the same name as the .htm file. To protect it from being uploaded, it is stored in a folder called "\qksource" (which is never uploaded). Text for the home page for Rorie's wedding is stored in "d:\qkw\captainspeed\wedding\qksource\index.txt".
• All the image documentation available from Bill Parke's function called "SizeofIMG" (my...) is available from that function.
• Additional documentation is provided from a .sf file. This might include photographer or artist, brief description, or more elaborate annotation.
• An important feature is that you can begin the structure including whatever you have at the moment. All that you don't have is checked for and skipped if it does not exist yet. As the missing content is added (e.g. thumbnails, or annotation), the system recognizes them and uses them.
• This is all the documentation I can manage at the moment. More later.

The following functions are important.

• ImageLink : deliver image reference code for one image.
• ImageIndex :
• CreateImageIndex : create an index.htm with links to all files in a folder (very useful as catalogue of .gif & .jpg files).
• TestCreateImageIndex : test CreateImageIndex in many examples for testing.