Make great looking web photo albums using Thumb Studio

Posted on May 7, 2009 at 5:40 am

Are you tired of Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr’s photo galleries? If you have your own web space hosted somewhere then making your own web photo album is a good alternative to those popular yet design-restricted web services. I found a tool that will turn your photos into great looking photo albums.

The best part is that this is free, unlike the ones from Adobe. The software is from ArcLab (their homepage is www.arclab.com) and it is called ArcLab Thumb Studio. I think it is named Thumb Studio because it can create photo albums with thumbnails on it.

The software is about 10MB in size and is a breeze to install. Once you open the tool it lets you choose from predefined templates. To start making a photo album site, click the Project Selection tab then choose from any of the templates on the tree view at the left side. The preview will appear on the right side of the tool.

After selecting a template, click the next button at the lower right corner to set the image settings. This tab lets you set advanced settings of image quality, I just leave these parameters alone. The next tab is called the “Project Settings” – it contains the properties of your chosen template. Here you will see the colors and fonts used and caption settings. I usually leave this alone too since I want to retain the look of my chosen template.

Click the Image and Album selection tab to add images to your project. Use the add and remove buttons on the Image panel to add or remove images.

On the next tab, enter the title of the page then click create to start creating the output files:

That’s it. The process of creating the web files is quick – only a few seconds. The next tab will let you FTP your files to your web server or you can explore the output files locally so you can test them from your PC’s browser.

If you chose to explore the files, open the file with 0000.htm at the end. This is the first file.

You should see your browser open with that page displayed.

Isn’t this a fun way to make online photo albums with a few key and mouse strokes? The best part of this is that the software is free! I am highly recommending this for folks who want to share their pictures using their own web hosting.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

Comments

One Response to “Make great looking web photo albums using Thumb Studio”

jean said on : May 28th, 2009 at 10:22 am

Wow, this looks awesome! I’m going to try it in the next few days and report back. I’m new at web design and this seems like an app that will give me an edge.