It's here. Ready to play. Cleaned and streamlined. Try it out, and let me know what you think. If you've used a previous pre-release version [1], you'll want to trash your preferences file before giving this a try.

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The only caveat I can mention at this point is that the background worker thread does quite a bit more than I want it to. What this means is that it won't quit snappily if you drag in your entire iPhoto library. It'll keep processing, having queued up your request to Quit, "Yup, I'll get there. Once I'm done with all 19,000 images..."

It's the major bit of plumbing I want to fix before a final 1.0 release.

You can choose other directories where thumbnails should be saved. Thumbscrew remembers these settings between running.

You can scale down the original images to make them web-ready, and save them out to alternate directories.

Thumbscrew ships with a template that generates valid XHTML, but can use any templates it finds in ~/Library/Application Support/Thumbscrew/Templates/. These templates must be of a style that Nevow [2] understands. Currently, that includes HTML and XML.

Documentation about the template format will be included later, as well as further examples.

Thumbscrew reports on its progress, including how long it took to thumbnail how many images.

The rendering of the template is presented here, and it can be further edited. Both the Activity Log and Web Page can be saved to the filesystem.

In addition, there are three hidden prefs that can be set outside of Thumbscrew:

• TSRecursivelyProcessFolders - when you drop a folder onto Thumbscrew, it will ask you if you want to drill down and thumbnail all images found. Setting this to TRUE will prevent the dialog from asking each time. Default is FALSE.

  defaults write com.urbanape.thumbscrew TSRecursivelyProcessFolders -bool TRUE

• TSThumbnailImageFormat - by default, Thumbscrew creates PNG files, since they support full alpha channels. I don't know whether it's CoreGraphics or what, but Panther makes these HUGE. It's the single most numerous request I got, so here it is: You can set the output format to JPEG, though in doing so, you'll likely want to set the next hidden pref, too. Valid values are PNG, JPEG (or JPG), and TIFF (or TIF). Default is PNG.

  defaults write com.urbanape.thumbscrew TSThumbnailImageFormat 'JPEG'

• TSThumbnailImageBackgroundColor - by default, Thumbscrew sets the background color of the thumbnail image to white with 0% opacity. If you're creating JPEGs and want the thumbnails to match your site, you'll want to include a background color. Values are floats from 0.0 to 1.0, for each of Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha. For JPEGs on a white background, for instance, you would use -array -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0, while for PNGs with a transparent background, you could use anything for the first three, and -float 0.0 for the alpha channel. Default is (1.0 1.0 1.0 0.0).

  defaults write com.urbanape.thumbscrew TSThumbnailImageBackgroundColor -array -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0 -float 1.0