Thumbscrew
You might have noticed all the thumbnails on this site. Maybe you haven’t. In any case, I wanted something that would easily generate that nonchalant, scattered look, so I wrote a script in Python using PIL to do it. It worked well enough, but I wanted to be able to distribute it and let others play, so I wrapped it up in a tidy little app. I call it Thumbscrew, since it thumbnails and rotates.
You can set the maximum angle that any given thumbnail will be rotated (plus or minus), the maximum size of the thumbnail’s bounding box (before rotation), and the border thickness. I’ve provided some handy default options, and the combo box lets you set the values arbitrarily.
I’ve passed it around to a few friends, and am already getting feedback and feature requests!
It’s written in Python, using PyObjC for the GUI, and I’m distributing the source with the MIT license. If you don’t want to use the GUI, you can also just use the included Thumbnailer.py module which is where the heavy lifting occurs, but you’ll need PIL installed. To build the source, you’ll need Bob Ippolito’s py2app distutils extension.
