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 labeled 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/share/doc/cthumb/README) for more detailed info.

OPTIONS

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

7th Edition                                         02/19/01                                           CTHUMB(1)