Additionally, Photo Studio provides a browse window allowing thumbnails of a whole directory to be viewed at one time, and "batch" operations to be performed on ranges of images.
Photo Studio supports lossless transformations, thanks to code from the Independant JPEG Group. Conventionally, JPEG images would be transformed by first decompressing them, then performing the transformation, then recompressing the transformed image. Given that JPEG is a lossy compression method, some image quality is potentially lost in this process. Where it can, Photo Studio will transform JPEG images without decompressing them.
One slight drawback of performing lossless image transformations is that partial blocks cannot be transformed. JPEG images are made up of blocks, normally 8x8 (or sometimes 16x16). Where an image's dimensions don't fit exactly into these block sizes, we will be left with partial blocks on one edge. The lossless transformation routines will not transform these, so some images may be left with an untidy edge. Thankfully, dimensions of digital camera sourced images are normally a multiple of 8 or 16 (e.g. 640x480), and so normally this should not happen. TO DO: A future version of Photo Studio will provide options to trim these edges or perform transformations in the usual (lossy) manner where these edges would occur.
One advantage of using Photo Studio over (say) a conventional paint program, is that it will transform inline thumbnails at the same time as the main image. Both JPEG and bitmap thumbnails can be transformed in this way. Of course, where an inline thumbnail is stored as a bitmap, it can be transformed without any of the above difficulties. Note that only JFIF or EXIF inline thumbnails can be transformed. Thumbnails found in marker sections of an unknown format will not be transformed as we may in the process damage the integrity of the section.
Additionally Photo Studio allows you to perform several transfomations in sequence, and will calculate the equivalent transformation as it goes along. As such when you eventually save the changes (be it from the browse window or for an individually loaded image) the transformation will be performed in a single pass.
Upon selecting this option, you will be presented with a dialog with two property pages as follows:
Upon selecting this option, you will be presented with a dialog with two property pages as follows:
The various settings for this template can be edited by either double clicking anywhere in the template's window, or by selecting Properties... from the Template menu. This then produces a dialog with two property pages.
The components box allows the user to select a single, list or range of components. Ranges are specified with dashes (e.g. 3-10), and single components (or indeed further ranges) can be separated by commas (e.g. 1,5 or 4,7-12,15 etc). As an example, with a date/time field, we might choose just components 12-20 to get the time but not the date.
The "Thumbs path" field gives the path of the thumbnail files that will be written in the HTML file - which may differ from their physical path on the current disk. This is partly because URLs use forward slashes rather than the backslashes used in Windows (although Windows seems to accept both), but also because the directory your pictures will reside in on the web (say http://www.mysite.com/) will obviously be different from the directory they reside in on your hard drive (say C:\Web\).
We need the names of these thumbnails to insert into the HTML file. Their path on the local drive is required so they can be examined during the creation of the index to extract their dimensions. As noted above, the path used on the web for the thumbnails may be different to that used on the local drive. The path given on this property page will not be inserted into the HTML file - that path will instead be taken from the index property page.