IrfanView is a free image viewer that makes it easy to post your pictures on the Web using the export thumbnails command. This command creates an index page of thumbnails and hyperlinks to the full-size images. These instructions were written for version 3.21 but probably apply to other versions too.
Difficulty: Average
Time Required: 15 minutes
Here's How:
- Prepare your photos for the Web by rotating, cropping, resizing, and color correcting, if necessary. Refer to the related information in the links below for tips on prepping your pictures.
- Place the photos you want to include in the gallery in a folder on your hard drive.
- Choose an empty folder or create a new one to use as a destination folder for the files created for the Web gallery.
- Open IrfanView.
- Press T on the keyboard to launch the thumbnail window.
- In the thumbnail screen, go to Options > Set Thumbnail Options.
- Under Thumbnail quality, select the Use Resample box.
- Under Thumbnail size, choose the desired size for the thumbnail images that IrfanView will generate. 80x80 or 100x100 is a good size to use.
- Under Exporting Thumbnails as HTML, check the box to copy original images to same directory. If desired, check the other two boxes to display the file name and/or file size below the thumbnails.
- Ignore the Thumbnail MRUD's section. It's not required for creating a photo gallery page.
- Click OK to exit the Thumbnail options.
- In the left pane of the Thumbnails window, navigate to the folder where you placed your photos and wait for IrfanView to generate the thumbnails. It only takes a few seconds.
- Arrange the size of the thumbnail window to reflect how you want your Web page thumbnails arranged.
- Go to Options > Select all.
- Go to File > Save selected thumbs as HTML file. A browse window will appear. Navigate to the destination folder you selected in Step 3 and click OK.
Tips:
- IrfanView creates a Thumbnails.html page, thumbnail images, and copies the original full-size files to the same folder.
- You can upload the entire destination folder to your Web sever as-is, or open the html page in a Web page editor to change its appearance. You'll probably want to change the title and possibly the background color.
- IrfanView creates links directly to the full-size images. When you click an image or hyperlink in the thumbnail page, the full-size image will open in a new browser window.
- Your thumbnail pages can consist of selected images instead of an entire folder. Instead of choosing select all in step 14, hold the Ctrl key down and click on each of the images you want to include.
