NAME

       cthumb - a themable web picture album generator

SYNOPSIS

       cthumb -c [options] imagefile ... > file.album

       cthumb [options] file.album

DESCRIPTION

       Cthumb  creates  themable web picture albums with thumbnails of all the pictures, comments
       for each picture, etc.  Cthumb allows you to create web picture albums,  i.e.  collections
       of  digital  pictures,  with  small  thumbnails  of  your  pictures  and with captions. In
       addition, it allows you to have several views of the collection of pictures. An  album  is
       composed  of  a series of pages, each composed of a collection of pictures. For each album
       page may optionally have two or more versions, like  for  instance  in  English,  Spanish,
       German,  French, etc. So your visitors would go into the English version of the web album,
       into the Spanish version, etc.

       Typically (this is what I use it for and why I wrote the program), you accumulate lots and
       lots  of  digital  pictures and you need to label them and sort them out. Perhaps also you
       have friends and family that speak different languages. This program lets you very  easily
       make picture albums and have the same pictures labelled in one or more languages.

       You  can  customize  almost  everything in the way the albums look on the screen, from the
       size of the thumbnails to the background and foreground colors, the border colors, whether
       you want film-strips and their picture, etc.

OPERATION

       Cthumb  has  two  modes  of  operation.  The  first one, which is active when option -c is
       specified, prints an album file, via stdout, comprising all the images given as  arguments
       to  the  command line. This is the first thing you need to do if you have never tried this
       program before, just to get you started. Once you have an album file, you edit it and  put
       comments  to  the pictures, titles to the album pages, etc. In this mode, all the provided
       options in the command line will be passed through to the album file.  See the  format  of
       the album file in section ALBUM FILES below.

       The  second  mode  is the regular mode, the one that actually creates web pages, given the
       album file, so it is the one that does the real work of the script. Given an  album  file,
       cthumb  generates  web  pages containing picture albums and an index with links to all the
       albums generated.

       Cthumb creates several HTML files, one per "Page" in the album.

       Check the README file (probably in /usr/doc/cthumb*/README) for more detailed info.

OPTIONS

       -c <files>  Create an album file with the files listed and spit it out in stadard out.

       -l <n>      Do pages in <n> languages.

       -f <n>      Go into film mode (<n> thumbnails per row).

       -r          Force re-generation of all thumbnails (slow).

       -x <n>      Make thumbnail width <n>.

       -y <n>      Make thumbnail height <n>.

       -n          In film mode, don't generate the strips.

       -m          Don't generate a main index file.

       -k          Generate text captions under the thumbnails.

       -t          Check the thumbnail width/height from the  thumbnail  image  itself.  This  is
                   slow.

       -b          Put the bytes of the main picture in the caption.

FILES

       By default cthumb creates the following files (foo being the name of the album file):

       foo-index.html  The table of contents.

ALBUM FILES

       Album  files have a simple, textual format. First, comments in the file are started by the
       # character and last to the end of the line. The best way to find out the format is to use
       the -c <files> option for album creation mode, which outputs an album file in stdout.

PER-USER VARIABLES

       cthumb  allows  users to have their own variable settings in $HOME/.cthumbrc which is read
       and interpreted by perl. If perl cannot parse the file, cthumb will complain rather  dryly
       that there is a parse error in the file.

VERSION

       This is cthumb version 4.2.

       The latest version of cthumb can be found at this URL:

       http://puchol.com/cpg/software/cthumb/

AUTHOR

       The  main  author  Carlos Puchol <cpg@nospam.puchol.com>.  A couple of other people around
       the net contributed to this program.  See the AUTHORS file.

LICENSE

       This program is released under the GNU GPL license.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright by Carlos Puchol, 1999, 2001. Warranty: the usual.  No guarantee  whatsoever  is
       provided. No liability whatsoever is accepted for any loss or damage of any kind resulting
       from any defect or inaccuracy in this information or code.

SEE ALSO

       perl(1), pnm(5), djpeg(1), rdjpgcom(1), cjpeg(1)

BUGS

       Option -r regenerates all thumbnails as the program sees them, i.e.  one per language.  If
       a  picture  is listed twice in the album, it will be generated double the amount of times.
       If you have a lot of thumbnails, this can get lengthy.  A  workaround  is  to  delete  the
       thumbnails you want re-generated and run cthumb without the -r option.