Thumbscrew

Automating an Automatic Process?

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:44:49 -0400

Question: How would you use Thumbscrew with Automator or AppleScript?

Appcast URL Fixed

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:24:07 -0500

Sorry if that was a hassle for anyone. The appcast was being requested from an older machine that had been decommissioned. The URL is now being hosted with my other sites. 1.0 is still the latest version.

Thumbscrew 1.0 Final

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 19:31:00 -0400

After nearly 3 years in the oven, it’s baked.

From the manual:

Screw it! Making thumbnails for the Web used to be painstakingly slow if you wanted to apply borders, drop shadows, transformations, alpha channels, and so on. Or if it was fast, you ended up with a boring field of rigid columns and rows. Thumbscrew allows you to quickly and easily chew through a bunch of images, applying scaling, random rotation, border, and drop shadow to each – even resizing the original, and processing the batch as a whole afterwards.

Images can come from a variety of places:

Drag images (or folders of images) in from the Finder

Paste images from the Clipboard

Paste or drag in URLs to images

When images are being processed, the image well in the main window will be briefly replaced with the original, and as the thumbnail is created, with the thumbnail. A progress bar at the bottom tracks overall progress of the batch.

After a batch has run, a batch file is created in ~/Library/Application Support/Thumbscrew/Batches/ and the selected post-flight script is run with this file as its only argument.

What it looks like:

What it does:

Not much in the way of new features:

Manual included and accessible from Help menu
Proper handling of Paste keybindings (command-V vs. command-option-V)
New appcast URL.

Get it while it’s hot.

Thumbscrew 1.0b16

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:39:00 -0400

The new version is out. It adds SparklePlus support, which will let you auto-update (at intervals, or manually), and if you choose, you can share back some anonymous profiling information (processor type, OS version, &c) so I can better know my user base. There is absolutely no personal information sent back (other than what I already know: you’ve got enough taste to use a Mac).

Also, I’ve finally got my post-processing script support finished. You can script the batch any way you like. Thumbscrew finishes a batch by calling the selected script directly, with one argument, the path to the batch file:

/path/to/script_file /path/to/batch_file

All the scripts live in ~/Application Support/Thumbscrew/Scripts, and all the batches live in ~/Application Support/Thumbscrew/Batches. Thumbscrew ships with a sample script, save_to_desktop.py, that copies the batch file from the batches folder to the Desktop:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
import os.path

batch_file_path = sys.argv[-1]

desktop_file_path = os.path.join(os.path.expanduser(u'~/Desktop'),
                                 os.path.split(batch_file_path)[-1])

inp = open(batch_file_path)
contents = inp.read()
inp.close()

outp = open(desktop_file_path, 'w')
outp.write(contents)
outp.close()

Since the script is called directly, the only thing to watch out for is that its executable bit is turned on. The batch file is an XML document with information about the batch:

Also, when images are pasted into Thumbscrew, it gives the pasted image a name, and stores it in ~/Pictures/Thumbscrew, so if you’re making thumbnails or resized originals that should be living where the original does, it won’t be relegated to an unfriendly /tmp directory.

Last, but not least, I’ve changed the icons a little, from our recent trip to Borneo. The application icon is being worked on, as well, and will show up in a later release.

Download

Thumbscrew Getting Press

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:50:00 -0500

Thumbscrew’s been making some rounds. Thanks, everyone!

Switchblog

FreeMacWare: “This is a great way to make a thumbnail if you are going to post the picture online. It’s fast too.”

which was picked up by TUAW and Mike Power

The Apple Blog “ThumbScrew rocks my world, and I’m so happy to hear that it’s been updated”

Random Murmurings tried to tie it together with flickr.

Hit Any Key: “Thumbscrew is one of those handy little photo tools that can make you look good, and fast!”

pedersondesigns: “My new favorite application.”

Stability of Our Times: “One cool Mac app: Thumbscrew. Great fun and ease!”

MacReviewCast: Right around the 24:22 mark, listen to Jeff Powell. “Real small, single purpose app, very well done. … One of those apps that tries to do one thing, and does a pretty good job of it.”

ReelSmart: “makes a very cool thumbnail image instantly”

And those are just the sites in English!

Italian: ZeroNáve and inblogtecno

Korean: Heaven2 and AppleTree

Spanish: Applesfera, Comando + Q, and Think Wasabi

Japanese: Smantou, Pisces, and Slowpoke

Thumbscrew 1.0b12

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:59:00 -0500

Have at it. Includes GIF support for thumbnails.

I’m changing the whole Web Page output story, and it’s partially underway, but it’s not finished yet. Basically, I’m making it possible for you to do whatever you want (hopefully) with the end product of each batch run. For the curious, look in /tmp after a batch, and you’ll see an XML file describing all the images processed in that run. This file will be passed to a script that you choose (or write!), so you can do anything you want with the results.

Download 1.0b12

[Update: Fixed the sidebar link. Thanks, Lorne]

Thumbscrew: It Is Alive

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:20:00 -0500

It’s been a long time coming, I know. Thanks so much to everyone who waited patiently. But it’s back, and it’s good. Thumbscrew 1.0b11

It’s Universal now. The problems I ran into with running subprocesses using a bundled Python are gone. I reimplemented the thumbnailer kernel using ObjC with the help of Scott Stevenson. Huge thanks, Scott.

It’s got Growl support. We’ll let you know bit by excruciating bit how Thumbscrew is doing, and when a batch is done.

Web page output is currently suspended while I evaluate the best way to generate output. I’ve used a variety of means in the past, and want something that is approachable by lots of users. Zope PageTemplates are pretty easy, and the syntax for developing new templates is pretty straightforward. XML and XSLT are maybe a little more universal, but I really don’t know.

Take her out for a spin and let me know what you think!

Download 1.0b11

Thumbscrew 1.0b1

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

It’s here. Ready to play. Cleaned and streamlined. Try it out, and let me know what you think. If you’ve used a previous pre-release version [1], you’ll want to trash your preferences file before giving this a try.

Download

The only caveat I can mention at this point is that the background worker thread does quite a bit more than I want it to. What this means is that it won’t quit snappily if you drag in your entire iPhoto library. It’ll keep processing, having queued up your request to Quit, “Yup, I’ll get there. Once I’m done with all 19,000 images…”

It’s the major bit of plumbing I want to fix before a final 1.0 release.

You can choose other directories where thumbnails should be saved. Thumbscrew remembers these settings between running.

You can scale down the original images to make them web-ready, and save them out to alternate directories.

Thumbscrew ships with a template that generates valid XHTML, but can use any templates it finds in ~/Library/Application Support/Thumbscrew/Templates/. These templates must be of a style that Nevow [2] understands. Currently, that includes HTML and XML.

Documentation about the template format will be included later, as well as further examples.

Thumbscrew reports on its progress, including how long it took to thumbnail how many images.

The rendering of the template is presented here, and it can be further edited. Both the Activity Log and Web Page can be saved to the filesystem.

In addition, there are three hidden prefs that can be set outside of Thumbscrew:

TSRecursivelyProcessFolders - when you drop a folder onto Thumbscrew, it will ask you if you want to drill down and thumbnail all images found. Setting this to TRUE will prevent the dialog from asking each time. Default is FALSE.

defaults write com.urbanape.thumbscrew TSRecursivelyProcessFolders -bool TRUE

TSThumbnailImageFormat - by default, Thumbscrew creates PNG files, since they support full alpha channels. I don’t know whether it’s CoreGraphics or what, but Panther makes these HUGE. It’s the single most numerous request I got, so here it is: You can set the output format to JPEG, though in doing so, you’ll likely want to set the next hidden pref, too. Valid values are PNG, JPEG (or JPG), and TIFF (or TIF). Default is PNG.

defaults write com.urbanape.thumbscrew TSThumbnailImageFormat ‘JPEG’

TSThumbnailImageBackgroundColor - by default, Thumbscrew sets the background color of the thumbnail image to white with 0% opacity. If you’re creating JPEGs and want the thumbnails to match your site, you’ll want to include a background color. Values are floats from 0.0 to 1.0, for each of Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha. For JPEGs on a white background, for instance, you would use -array -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0, while for PNGs with a transparent background, you could use anything for the first three, and -float 0.0 for the alpha channel. Default is (1.0 1.0 1.0 0.0).

defaults write com.urbanape.thumbscrew TSThumbnailImageBackgroundColor -array -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0

[1]

Like the one listed on DrunkenBlog

[2]

That’s pronounced Nouveau (for Matt)

Selecting Base Paths in Thumbscrew

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

I’m curious if any of you currently use the Web page feature of Thumbscrew. I use it mostly for my blog posts (I use PyBlosxom and use the reStructuredText plugin), and its development has mostly been to scratch my own itch. I’ve seen feedback both in private and on VersionTracker and MacUpdate asking about a few possible features:

incorporating FTP/WebDAV for actually posting the Web pages
relative links/base tag/DOCROOT or the like, so the page isn’t riddled with /Users/foo/path/to/thumbnails/

Frankly, I’m a little intimidated by the first part. I’d be much more likely to put something together and send it to MarsEdit or some other app altogether.

The second has me interested, though, and is a bit more exciting from a UI point of view. Here’s my typical workflow, and how I might approach this. After thinking about this in my head for a while, it seems to be an overly geeky solution.

So, here’s my server setup. All my blog posts are somewhere within the hierarchy of /home/zbir/html/blog/ (organized by categories and whatnot). All the images are in /home/zbir/html/images/ (with subdirectories for photos/ and thumbnails/). This whole setup is mirrored on my laptop substituting /home/zbir/html/ with /Users/zbir/Sites/. A typical edited image stanza for me looks like this:

.. |DSCN5380| image:: images/thumbnails/DSCN5380_thumbnail.png
   :target: images/photos/DSCN5380.jpg

And the template that renders the final page on the server specifies a which allows me to use relative paths like that. It’s so far been a small enough amount of work to just do a find/replace for the first part of those paths and wipe them out, but I would love to have Thumbscrew do it all for me.

One solution I’ve imagined is this. Say you take the two paths (one for thumbnails and one for originals), and find the full path that is at least shared between them. For my setup, that shared path would be ‘/Users/zbir/Sites/images’. Now, I could come up with a UI that presents those elements in a way that allows you to select the base path as far as your web server is concerned, like the Finder does:

In my case, ‘images’. Once that is selected, then the paths formed when applying the template would trim off everything up to that base path.

Does this make sense at all? If no one really uses the Web page features from Thumbscrew, I’ll probably implement something like this and just use it myself.

Thumbscrew 1.0b2

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

Okay, okay. I have heard my users. You want it, you got it.

Two other bug fixes:

A slight bug in the Web page handling. It assumed all the thumbnails were PNG format; now it reflects the chosen format.
If you didn’t have any preferred location for thumbnails or originals, it wouldn’t have anything selected in the preference panes; now it selects Same as original.

Download

Say Hello

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

This is the new face of Thumbscrew

Many users sent me feature requests that were jaw-droppingly obvious, so I added them. Users wanted:

Preferences to keep your settings between sessions

An alternate place to save thumbnails
Better feedback when images were dropped
Folders supported in addition to a group of images (for instance, you can now drag in Albums from iPhoto)
Alternate thumbnail formats
Speed! Thumbscrew now uses CoreGraphics (Quartz) for its thumbnail processing, and threads for a responsive UI, and the results are outstanding:
- Processing thumbnails is now over 10x faster than before
- Gamma is preserved (meaning no more dark thumbnails - PIL on the left, and CoreGraphics on the right)

In addition to these improvements, I’ve added two new features that I think will provide a lot of value:

Rescale the original image (and save it to another location)

Generate a Web Page of the thumbnails created (in either HTML or reStructuredText)

It’s not yet ready for general release, but I wanted to let people know I’ve been listening to the feedback I’m getting. It will remain free for everything it currently does (plus the extra thumbnailing features), but I’m planning on charging a small fee to unlock the new features.

Thumbscrew 0.1.1

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

Man, how dumb do I have to be to release an app that doesn’t do what it prominently claims? Yesterday’s release was not obeying any Max Angle constraint placed on it due to a typo on my part. Fixed.

I was incredibly impressed by the feedback I got (both here and in private), and by the number of downloads reported by VersionTracker. Hope I haven’t driven anyone away.

Updated binary and source.

Thumbscrew 1.0 - Good News (for you)

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

I had been planning on releasing the next version of Thumbscrew as a $10 shareware app, leaving all the 0.1.1 features unlocked and available for free. But before I could do this, I needed the release from my employer that says I retain rights to what I do after-hours.

I received and signed the agreement, so I retain IP rights to the software. However, one stipulation is that I not commercialize my private time creations while I’m currently employed, so I can’t release Thumbscrew as shareware.

Bad news for me. Good news for you. I’m going to continue releasing it as freeware. I won’t distribute the source anymore, but everyone [*] can use Thumbscrew’s new features.

The only feature improvement since the last announcement is that I’m using Zope 3’s Page Templates for the output of the web page, meaning you can completely stylize the output. The two templates included will offer reStructuredText or HTML output.

I’ve got a few last bits of tidying up to do before releasing it this weekend.

[*]

Everyone running Mac OS X 10.3 and above. Sorry, Jaguarians.

Thumbscrew: The Masses Have Spoken

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

Okay, you mangy, teeming millions. I have heard your cries, though they sicken me. “Give us GIF! Give us GIF! Have pity on the throwbacks still using Internet Explorer!” Your wails and gnashing of teeth have not fallen upon deaf ears. Turns out, it was stupid simple to implement. BEHOLD! Thumbscrew supports GIF!

I’m warning you, though. It ain’t pretty. If you need any kind of color fidelity, you’re better off with JPEG and an opaque background color. These GIFs, while small, are uggs. With a capital UGG.

You can do transparent

Or opaque backgrounds

Okay? Happy? If you really want to make the world a prettier place, encourage your friends and colleagues to switch. At least to Firefox, if not to a Mac.

By the way, I’m still getting the Web page thing done. I know a lot of you probably don’t use it, but I do, and I need it if I’m going to keep talking to you crazies. Expect a new version by Friday.

Why Thumbscrew Won't Output GIFs

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

A lot of people ask me for GIF support for one of two reasons:

Smaller file size than the default PNG
More widely compatible with browsers on that other OS.

While I can understand and sympathize, Thumbscrew won’t support GIF output until Apple’s CoreGraphics does. That said, there are (to me) compelling reasons not to use GIFs for a photo thumbnailing application, especially one that generates drop shadows:

GIFs don’t actually support an alpha channel, so even if you did get GIF output, you only get to replace one indexed color with a transparency. This would lead to ugly output unless you matched the background, in which case, why bother with transparency at all?
GIFs are not the best image format for photo-realistic content.

My advice to users who want smaller file size (or more widely compatible file format) is to use JPEGs with an opaque background color to match your site.

I will be evaluating pngcrush to see if it would at all be applicable. You all aren’t the only ones who’d like to see the size of the PNGs come down.

Thumbscrew Mailing List

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

Wow, almost a month since the last post. Many apologies! PyCon gave me huge amounts of energy to put back into Thumbscrew, but work has been incredibly hectic, and the house is nearing its own dénouement, so it’s been a little on the back burner.

This past week, though, I was able to make the time to hack on it a bit more. The next beta is almost here. All the prefs are back and accounted for (not using the UserDefaultsController just yet), and I’ve added a much-requested pref to determine the suffix to be used for thumbnails. It’s now using subprocesses to handle the busy work, and distributed events to communicate back to Thumbscrew.

In the process of just getting The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work™ working, I prevented using the background Thumbnailer as a viable standalone solution for people who wanted to script it. This isn’t a long-term situation, just needed it up and running in the now.

Since I get sporadic feedback, and many of the feature requests are duplicates, I created a mailing list for anyone interested in communicating their wishes, comments, bug reports, &c.

http://lists.palladion.com/mailman/listinfo/thumbscrew-users

Alternately, you can send a message directly to:

thumbscrew-users-subscribe@lists.palladion.com

Hope to see the users joining so we can find out where Thumbscrew needs to go.

Thumbscrew Nears a b3

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

I did a lot of work on Thumbscrew here at PyCon, and it’s really paying off. I’ve got the two subprocesses churning stuff out now, posting notifications, which the main program uses to update the display and progress indicator. I had to rip out quite a lot of code to get down to a simple reimplementation, so the Preferences stuff is all broken right now. This is actually okay with me, since I’ll be using an NSUserDefaultsController to map the preferences into the UI, rather than hand-wiring all the outlets and actions. So it was going to need to be rewritten, anyway.

Now, when you accidentally drop your whole iPhoto Library onto Thumbscrew, you can stop it at any point. Hurray, coming soon to a desktop near you.

Thumbscrew Mentioned on Call for Help

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

Amazing! My little app was mentioned on the Call for Help with Leo Laporte show. An exerpt from the transcript:

Leo: Have you ever — I’m just gonna take a walk over here. (Mellow instrumental)

Leo: Have you ever wandered around on the computer, on the studio floor, and said, “I’m gonna take a little —” Have you ever wanted your online photos to look unique? “Look unique?” This is —

Mikey: Look different!

Leo: Mike has a free file to make all your photos online look just… a little different, kind of askew.

Mikey: Askew almost. (Laughing)

Leo: What is this program?

Mikey: It’s called “Thumbscrew.”

Leo: Oh, I love Thumbscrew!

Mikey: It is a great program.

Leo: I use Thumbscrew.

Mikey: And it allows you to —

Mikey: What it does is it takes the image that you have, a photograph or even a drawing or whatever you have in your computer, and you can turn it — it’ll make it slide side to side.

Leo: And you can put a frame on it.

Mikey: Put a frame around it, coloured background.

Leo: This is, by the way, a free file for Mac only unfortunately.

Mikey: Exactly, yeah.

Leo: So don’t get your hopes up, Windows people. I’m sure there’s something like it —

Mikey: There should be something like that, because this is a fantastic program, so —

Leo: I use it all the time.

Mikey: Yeah. so i’ll just show you how it works right here. you take a photo — this is a photo I took the other night.

Mikey: And I’m just gonna drop it into the Thumbscrew window, and it’s gonna take a second.

Leo: And it does its thing.

Mikey: It does its thing. (Both make funny sounds)

Mikey: And it pops up, you can see here, a little one. It’s called “thumb.” It’s renamed.

Leo: It’s a thumbnail.

Mikey: It’s a thumbnail of it. And I’ll open it up here.

Mikey: It just needs a second to load up here, but what it does is I’ve made it so it matches the colour scheme of my blog. So this is actually an upside-down picture, so it’s not really a good example, but I’ll do another one here of —

Leo: You can set how much it rotates it by, and I’ve actually — I always set it to the minimum, because I don’t want it to rotate —

Mikey: Yeah, I have it like, I think, at 35 degrees or something like that, just so it gives it a little bit of something different. Here’s a better example of —

Leo: Yeah, see that? Isn’t that cool?

Mikey: Of Leo, myself and Amber.

Leo: We were shooting pool the other night.

Mikey: Yeah.

Leo: No, we weren’t. (Laughing)

Mikey: And so this matches perfectly with, for instance, my blog background or your online photo album background.

Leo: So you can choose a picture —

Mikey: So I just have my —

Leo: Show us how you’ve used it.

Mikey: I’ll show you. I’ll just scroll down.

Leo: I do the same thing. In fact, when I did the last Geek Cruise, I did a whole photo album with thumbscrew, and it really looked nice.

Mikey: Exactly. So here’s an example of how it fits perfectly into my blog because it matches the background exactly. The colour’s the same, the border, and it looks like it’s — I’ve had people e-mail me and say, “What is this program?”

Leo: “How do you do this?”

Mikey: And it’s really simple, and it takes like 10 seconds.

Leo: Thumbscrew. You can do a whole batch of them.

Mikey: And you can do batches, exactly.

Leo: Just drag a whole bunch of files on there.

Mikey: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: Thumbscrew — I use it, and so does Mikey. Mikey likes it.

Mikey: (Chuckling) (Mellow guitar music)

(Thanks to Jack for the heads up)

Thumbscrew Bugs

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

“Goddamn bugs” — Nick the Van Driver, Men in Black

So, I now know there are plenty of bugs to go around in the latest Thumbscrew beta I put out. I’ll get to each and every one of them, but I was caught with my pants down. I had been testing with a fully fleshed out set of preferences and so didn’t catch the problems that were occurring for the people who were starting up Thumbscrew for the first time (the spinning beach ball of death when trying to open the Preferences).

Well, that was a shallow bug, and fixed easily, but that uncovered others. Suffice it to say there’s still a bit of work to be done before I send out 1.0b8, and it’ll be a while since this isn’t my day job. Amber promises I’ll have plenty of time to work on it this weekend. I hope you can bear with me for a few more days…

Thumbscrew 1.0b9

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:26:00 -0500

Few more bugfixes in this release:

.jpg instead of .jpeg
You can use a rotation of 0, and I added it explicitly to the list of values in the popup. A lot of people didn’t seem to understand that the combo boxes can have arbitrary values typed in.

There is still some work to be done with the web page creation. I plan on working on it some more, but I know these are the issues that were being reported the most after the latest release.

Thumbscrew 1.0b9 (Fixed link. Thanks, Marco)