Making Thumbnails Step 1: Thumbnail Tutorial We've previously discussed the reason and importance of using thumbnailed images on your gallery pages. Just to refresh your memory, we want our web page to load up in the shortest possible time whilst still giving our visitors a good idea as to what our full size images are like. We do this by using thumbnails, these are simply the original images which have been reduced in both dimension AND filesize. Please take note here that squashing a big picture into a small box will not make your page load any quicker. If you dont understand this, please read through the article Picture Sizes Explained. Okay, let's move on and make some thumbnails.

In order to do this we'll need some sort of graphics software. I recommend Irfanview, it's dead easy to use and it should be well within your budget 'cos it's totally free. Go ahead and download the program using the link above, install it on your PC and come back to me, I'll wait here for you. :-)

Ok, so you've got Irfanview installed correctly on your computer and you're raring to go. You're gonna need some images to mess about with. We'll use some of mine to start off with, 'cos we dont want accidents with your important stuff now, do we? :-) First of all, make two new folders on your desktop, name the first folder 'Pics' and the second 'Thumbs'. Just remember that we are gonna put the big pics, ie, the full size pics into the 'Pics' folder and the thumbnails that we create will go into the 'Thumbs' folder. I have 4 pics for you which I'd like you to copy to the 'Pics' folder on your desktop. Click on a link below to open a picture, then 'right-click' on it and select 'save picture as ..' Make sure you save the picture to the correct folder on your desktop so that you dont have to go searching for it later.

Pic 1 - Pic 2 - Pic 3 - Pic 4

Now repeat for the other three pictures. You now should have 4 pics in your 'Pics' folder on your desktop, have you? Yep? Great, let's move on.

Ok, let's kickstart this Irfanview and see what all the fuss is about. Start the Irfanview program and press 'T' on your keyboard, this will call up the thumbnail maker.


Browse to your desktop in the left window and select the 'Pics' folder.


Can you see the pictures that you downloaded earlier in the window on the right? You can? Good, we can move on to the next step, actually making the thumbnails.

Making Thumbnails Step 2