Dreamweaver Thumbnails

[Lawson]

Hi, I'm a FrontPage convert who just started using Dreamweaver 3. Does anyone know how to do thumbnail images in Dreamweaver? FrontPage had an "auto thumbnail" feature that you could select when inserting a graphic. I don't see anything like that in Dreamweaver. Do you just have to make a large and small version of your images and link them? Thanks for your help.

[Dan Kaplan]

Not knowing anything about FrontPage or DreamWeaver's thumbnail functions, let me just say that to create thumbnails by simply constraining the image size on the page (which it sounds like is what FrontPage is doing) is very much not recommended.  The result will be monster download times.  The only benefit (other than saving time for the webmaster), is that more little images can fit onto one page.  However, this only magnifies the problem by allowing you to load more and more uncompresses/non-minimized graphics onto the page...

A typical uncompressed jpeg image is in the neighborhood of 30k.  (I assume that you are not compressing your images if you are relying on the editor to "format" images, but I may be wrong.)  That same thumbnail will often be 1-2k.  Now, multiply that by maybe 20-30 images on a page and you are talking about a monstrous difference in download time.

I've seen some incredibly bad ones where a 280k b&w image is sized to about 2"x3" and makes the page virtually unvisitable because of table structure dependencies.  And I've seen that on college web sites with well paid webmasters...

Dan

[Lawson]

Thanks for the reply, Dan. No, FrontPage created a true thumbnail from what I could tell. When you'd hit the "auto thumbnail" option while on picture.jpg, for example, which might be a 3X5 photo, it would create another image called picture_small.jpg to put on the page, then create a link back to picture.jpg. I don't know what their shrink method was, though. I could always create shrunken copies of each picture in something like Image Composer, but that would sure be a pain..........

[WayneK]

Lawson

It's under commands--->create web photo album

[Lawson]

Many thanks, Wayne. I KNEW it had to be in there somewhere. Even though I'm brand new at DW, so far I haven't missed FrontPage a bit. The layers feature is especially cool....

[WayneK]

Just don't nest those layers or Netscape throws a fit

[sheila]

Oh, drat. Apparently that is a DW 3 new feature. I just booted up my copy of DW 2, and looked for that command. It's not there.

Well, one of these days, soon, we're going to get a newer copy.
<cha-ching$>

[Lawson]

Can y'all recommend any web design and/or Dreamweaver discussion forums?