If you are a webmaster or a person who usually develops websites, especially those containing large amounts of images, Image Index! may turn out to be of great help to you. This simple but versatile software program locally generates web pages (HTML files) with tables containing thumbnails of your images, so that your users may access them much more easily.
The program consists of a single window with a series of tabs that allow you to configure all the parameters required to generate your web pages exactly the way you want them. Among the most important ones, I should mention the "Run" tab and the "Tables Setup" tab. The former permits you to select the starting path - this is the folder the program will scan looking for your images, and where the resulting HTML files will be stored - and informs you about the number of subdirectories and files processed, and the indices created. The latter allows you to define the width and height of your table cells, the number of cells per row and of rows per page, whether to center the table or not, and if the file names should also be included in their respective cells.
A very important asset of this program is that it provides you with two different table creation methods - with or without real thumbnail generation. The latter just takes your images and resizes them to the width and height you want them to appear on your table, while the former creates an alternative set of reduced images (real thumbnails) - a much lighter option in most cases - and creates your table based on them. Of course, for a true public website the first method is much more advisable, because it will provide faster navigation to your users. The selection of the table creation method is what the "Thumbnails" tab is intended for.
On the "Header/Footer" tab, you can specify customized header and footer texts for your web page, and also define previously existing HTML files as templates. Finally, the program is also capable to create hierarchical index pages, where a cell on a webpage table can point to a similar page on a child directory. The "Hierarchy" tab allows you to enable those hierarchical links, to include back links in child pages, and to choose if the hierarchy should be displayed only on the first (parent) catalog page. You can define if the subdirectories will be sorted alphabetically only or by image count as well.
Even though Image Index! is a software tool that performs a very specific task, it may become a very important helping tool for web designers who usually add lots of images to their websites. Besides that, even though this program is shareware and has a reduced cost of $26.95 ($29.95 is its regular price), the trial version is fully functional and has no time restrictions, so you can use the program indefinitely and register it whenever you consider it necessary.
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