Making Thumbnails Programmatically
The last pages on this site to be updated after the redesign are the ones in the Photography section. (Don’t look; they’re a mess.) Among the many changes I wanted to make, one was to make the thumbnails larger. They are just too small. (What was I thinking?)
I don’t relish the idea of opening up all those pictures and saving out each one in a new and improved size. I knew there must be some kind of automated way to do it. Photoshop offers a way to create a "web gallery" with thumbnails, but I wanted all the thumbnails to have the same long dimension, and Photoshop doesn’t let you do that.
Apple’s Image Events looked promising. Image Events provides a way to use AppleScript to do just what I needed, but it only runs on Panther. ImageMagick is a powerful package that would work as well. The version available through Fink is rather old, so I am trying to build it from source. Most of the time, I rely on Fink to take the pain out of installing Unix software, so I don’t have much experience doing it the hard way. We’ll see how it goes.