[pmwiki-users] Question regarding Mini Recipe

[Petko Yotov]

On Thursday 16 April 2009 01:35:20 Sameer Kumar wrote:
> I would very much like to implement the Mini recipe however I am facing one
> problem: many of the pictures (actually photos) uploaded to my wiki are
> much larger than that screen size. I actually like the fact that the users
> are not required to reduce the images before uploading. As you can
> understand, very large images are not conducive to lightbox rendering.

There are two config.php variables that can disable Lightbox for large 
pictures, e.g. lagrer than 800x500 pixels :
  $Mini['LbMaxW'] = 800;
  $Mini['LbMaxH'] = 500;

This way, larger pictures will open directly in the browser, which should 
scale them down if they are larger than the full screen.

> The way I dealt with this in the Thumblist recipe was by using an Image
> template page. The small thumbnail on the main page linked to an Image
> template page which also included a thumbnail, but a larger one (800 px)
> thereby ensuring that the image was always smaller than the screen. The
> users could then chose to load the entire image through a link on that page
> if they desired.
>
> Is it possible to somehow achieve something similar with the Mini recipe
> where the recipe script actually creates two thumbnails for all the
> pictures, one smaller and one larger. The lightbox would then render the
> larger thumbnail and there would be a link on the footer for the full-sized
> image which would open by itself in the browser. This would also be make
> the lightbox rendering much quicker as the larger thumbnail would be much
> lighter than the full sized image. If this is possible, it would make a
> great tool even better!

Short answer :
No, but you can possibly use Cookbook:AutoThumber, a recipe which resizes down 
the pictures while they are uploaded. I resize the files _before_ uploading 
them which saves me time, bandwidth, electricity (=money & CO2).

Long answer :
The reason I started writing Mini was that I am unhappy with :
1. the size and the complexity of Thumblist
2. its huge number of non-essential features, at least non-essential for 99% 
   of the wikis, that once implemented, I am condemned to support for eternity
3. the long/hard/complicated beast that became the markup (:thumblist:) and 
   (:thumbgallery:) with all parameters.

For these reasons, I am trying to keep Mini small and simple, easy to use and 
unbloated, actually "mini" like its name says. For some (most) of its users, 
this is Mini's greatest feature.

I hope some of this makes sense.

You can resize down many pictures at once in "batch mode" with the freeware 
IrfanView on Windows, and with `convert` on normal operating systems. I use 
the following single-line command to scale down all 791 pictures in a folder 
to 900x600 pixels :

  convert '*.JPG' -resize "900x600>" -quality 85 paris%3d.jpg

This can be done in Windows too, with ImageMagick's `convert`.

Thanks,
Petko