A word about FrontPage Thumbnails

Opinions vary about the quality of the thumbnails automatically created by FrontPage. After looking at thumbnails on several corporate websites, I've come to the conclusion that they are "acceptable." But acceptable isn't always good enough and, if that's the case, you should spruce up the thumbnails a little as I often do. If you really want a top-notch thumbnail, you should create it directly from the original image. It's best to enhance them BEFORE publishing the Photo Gallery for the first time.

Original FP Thumbnail	FrontPage Thumbnail (edited)	Thumbnail made from original image

Click here to view the original image.

Photo by Gail Bjork
www.gtbdesign.com

After making a backup copy of the FrontPage folder which contains the thumbnail images, I open the original thumbnails folder within the web with image editing software and make adjustments. Usually a bit of sharpening and adjusting brightness and contrast is all that is needed. If you make changes to images which have already been published, and don't want to go through the hassle of changing file names, republish with FrontPage by selecting "All pages, overwriting all pages already on destination." The reason is that FrontPage does not recognize changes made outside itself with another program, so your images will not be overwritten on the server if you just publish "Changed pages only."

Some final thoughts

If you have lots of images to place on a website, it is probably wise to create additional galleries on separate pages which you can link together. Why? So a thumbnail page doesn't overwhelm a visitor with too many images. This will also prevent the Gallery page from becoming too long.

When your Photo Gallery is published, you'll be excited to send the link to it to family, friends and neighbors. Just make sure to check out the Gallery online before you do to make sure everything is working properly and looking good. Do images load in a reasonable amount of time? Is the table holding everything in place correctly? Are all the captions and descriptions spelled correctly?!

Everything A-OK! Now tell everyone you know about your online Photo Gallery!

 Related reading:

Using the Photo Gallery with Themes

Using the Photo Gallery with Cascading Style Sheets