Thu, 22 Nov 2007
Thumbscrew 1.0 Final
After nearly 3 years in the oven, it's baked.
From the manual:
Screw it! Making thumbnails for the Web used to be painstakingly slow if you wanted to apply borders, drop shadows, transformations, alpha channels, and so on. Or if it was fast, you ended up with a boring field of rigid columns and rows. Thumbscrew allows you to quickly and easily chew through a bunch of images, applying scaling, random rotation, border, and drop shadow to each – even resizing the original, and processing the batch as a whole afterwards.
Images can come from a variety of places:
- Drag images (or folders of images) in from the Finder
- Paste images from the Clipboard
- Paste or drag in URLs to images
When images are being processed, the image well in the main window will be briefly replaced with the original, and as the thumbnail is created, with the thumbnail. A progress bar at the bottom tracks overall progress of the batch.
After a batch has run, a batch file is created in ~/Library/Application Support/Thumbscrew/Batches/ and the selected post-flight script is run with this file as its only argument.
What it looks like:
What it does:
Not much in the way of new features:
- Manual included and accessible from Help menu
- Proper handling of Paste keybindings (command-V vs. command-option-V)
- New appcast URL.
Get it while it's hot.
Congrats again on getting it out! From an Apple Store no less! ;-)
Posted by Justin Miller at Mon Aug 13 15:05:10 2007
Posted by Justin Miller at Mon Aug 13 15:05:10 2007
Great app - thanks for your hard work. Macs are great only because of developers like you.
I've featured Thumbscrew on my blog here:
http://www.jasonswadley.com/2007/08/mac-freeware-th.html
Thanks again. Keep up the great work.
Posted by Jason Swadley at Fri Aug 17 14:41:41 2007
I've featured Thumbscrew on my blog here:
http://www.jasonswadley.com/2007/08/mac-freeware-th.html
Thanks again. Keep up the great work.
Posted by Jason Swadley at Fri Aug 17 14:41:41 2007
When trying to launch the application, I get an error: "ImportError: no module named os"
What does this mean, and how do I correct it?
(Note also that this comment form does not work well with Firefox. The cursor does not appear where the typing occurs.)
Posted by Gary Ford at Wed Aug 29 16:43:53 2007
What does this mean, and how do I correct it?
(Note also that this comment form does not work well with Firefox. The cursor does not appear where the typing occurs.)
Posted by Gary Ford at Wed Aug 29 16:43:53 2007
Nice, this just saved me a bunch of work! I was going to write a script to generate galleries for my site, but I just needed to write a small batch processor instead of the whole thing.
However, I did find a small bug that prevented me from importing Python modules from my site-packages. In addition to unsetting PYTHONPATH you need to unset PYTHONHOME before calling the batch. Otherwise it's still pointing to the libraries in Thumbscrew, so other modules can't be used. I've patched my app and it's working nicely now.
Posted by Matt Good at Wed Sep 12 07:17:00 2007
However, I did find a small bug that prevented me from importing Python modules from my site-packages. In addition to unsetting PYTHONPATH you need to unset PYTHONHOME before calling the batch. Otherwise it's still pointing to the libraries in Thumbscrew, so other modules can't be used. I've patched my app and it's working nicely now.
Posted by Matt Good at Wed Sep 12 07:17:00 2007
Another issue I've encountered is that sometimes the image files haven't all been written, or maybe just haven't fully flushed, when the batch script fires, so partway through it's failing b/c it can't find one of the files. I've added a call to time.sleep(1) in my script which seems to have helped, but maybe there's a way Thumbscrew can check this before calling the batch processor.
Posted by Matt Good at Wed Sep 12 08:12:54 2007
Posted by Matt Good at Wed Sep 12 08:12:54 2007
Thanks, Matt. Both good suggestions. I've fixed the first (PYTHONHOME polluting the batch script environment), and I'll try to address the second.
Posted by Zachery Bir at Tue Sep 25 13:29:06 2007
Posted by Zachery Bir at Tue Sep 25 13:29:06 2007
Gary: If you can contact me directly, I can try to help you out. I've never seen that before. Thumbscrew should be using its own Python bundle (included in the application) and so should have its own os module.
Posted by Zachery Bir at Tue Sep 25 13:30:45 2007
Posted by Zachery Bir at Tue Sep 25 13:30:45 2007
Hi, I got the same problem than Gary "No module named os"
Has anyone a solution for that ?
Posted by Florian at Sun Sep 30 20:33:26 2007
Has anyone a solution for that ?
Posted by Florian at Sun Sep 30 20:33:26 2007
This is a really cool application. Simple and effective.
I've however come across a small problem ... when creating thumbnails of files of the same Resolution (114x198), with a Max Angle of 0, a Size of 256 and a Border of 5 ... most of the time the thumbnails Resolution is 129x213 and every now and again it will be 102x166. Wierd.
Hopefully this something that can be fixed.
Anyhow, thanks for a great app.
Posted by Glen Ho at Fri Oct 26 23:50:26 2007
I've however come across a small problem ... when creating thumbnails of files of the same Resolution (114x198), with a Max Angle of 0, a Size of 256 and a Border of 5 ... most of the time the thumbnails Resolution is 129x213 and every now and again it will be 102x166. Wierd.
Hopefully this something that can be fixed.
Anyhow, thanks for a great app.
Posted by Glen Ho at Fri Oct 26 23:50:26 2007
Love the functionality, but ran into a tiny problem. I handed this program 1261 images to do at once and it locked my mac mini up after processing about 350 of them. After getting control back, I shoved smaller numbers at it while watching top run in a terminal window and noticed that there seems to be a memory problem somewhere. Although it didn't lock up my system, it crashed twice more at around 8GB of overhead. Thankfully, both times it processed the images prior to shutting down.
In conclusion, if you use this product, it's batch processing capability is limited to the low hundreds to avoid a crash and the high hundreds to avoid a system lockup (although this will crash the app). I'm not sure whether the memory problem is a leak or just a barrier that cannot be reached. I would encourage anyone running an Intel mac to try it out with a large number of pictures to see if the problems surface at the same level or, if my theory is correct, at the 64GB level. (dual core 64 bit means double memory twice in comparison with a single core 32 bit) What I also suspect is that even an Intel machine would lock up sooner than it's maximum capacity because of the virtual memory barrier or the available disk space gets used up.
In short, a wonderful product with a slight quirk. Don't get me wrong here, the memory problem is in no way a drawback to it's basic capability, I still rate this as a must have in my web design.
Posted by Phaldor at Tue Jan 15 15:25:15 2008
In conclusion, if you use this product, it's batch processing capability is limited to the low hundreds to avoid a crash and the high hundreds to avoid a system lockup (although this will crash the app). I'm not sure whether the memory problem is a leak or just a barrier that cannot be reached. I would encourage anyone running an Intel mac to try it out with a large number of pictures to see if the problems surface at the same level or, if my theory is correct, at the 64GB level. (dual core 64 bit means double memory twice in comparison with a single core 32 bit) What I also suspect is that even an Intel machine would lock up sooner than it's maximum capacity because of the virtual memory barrier or the available disk space gets used up.
In short, a wonderful product with a slight quirk. Don't get me wrong here, the memory problem is in no way a drawback to it's basic capability, I still rate this as a must have in my web design.
Posted by Phaldor at Tue Jan 15 15:25:15 2008
Thumbscrew 1.0