Generate Thumbnails Automatically

[BobWeaver]

FM6 has a provision to generate thumbnails when you import images, but if you are using an older version, or you already have a large number of images in your database that don't have thumbnails, this technique will generate them without the need for any plug-ins. It doesn't use Applescript either, so it's cross platform.

Note, I have also included a mass import script that does use Applescript for use on older FM versions on Macs, but it's not required for creating the thumbnails.

Thumbs.fp5.zip

[Vaughan]

A gotcha I discovered some time ago when I made a similar system to generate e-cards through Web Companion: if the machine running FMP does not have at least one printer setup then the preview does not work reliably, because page setup information comes from the printer driver. This was with FMP 4 but it may still hold true.

Not usually a problem with desktop computers, but it caught me out when I setup a web server with FMP 4.0 and didn't bother to setup a printer driver on the machine since I'd never be printing from it.

[BobWeaver]

Thanks for the info. I threw this together fairly quickly and didn't do too much testing with it. But, I know that using preview mode can be a bit touchy. So, it could require some tweaking.

BTW, this came about because I have a 6500 record database where one field contains Japanese script. I wanted to make it portable without worrying what fonts other users might have installed. So, I used this method to snapshot the Japanese text into a container field. It only increased the file size from 7 Meg to 8 Meg. So that wasn't too bad.

[Vaughan]

I love what you can do in Preview mode.

I'm just finishing a solution for some people who wanted to generate letters with boilerplate text, be able to edit the text on a letter-by-letter basis, and save the letter for reprinting. I ended up making a print routine that takes a preview-mode snapshot of every page, pastes it into a record, then prints the preview from the record. Amazingly it works cross-platform and the output is indistinguishable from normally printed text.

[BobWeaver]

Yes, I've had some clients that wanted to view summary parts on their layouts while "browsing." So, I set up a preview copy / paste script that puts the preview page into a container field so they can still use buttons to navigate back and forth, print etc.