Kristy24 — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 13:09:37 +0000

I think Google's Picasa might be what you're looking for. It's really simple and minimalistic, and it's free. There's a tour in picasa's website if you want to check the program features.

Megan — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:57:49 +0000

Found something! Using TweakUI you can change the default thumbnail size in Explorer. That's good enough for me

Megan — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:01:07 +0000

The problem I'm finding with many of these, include the MS Picture Viewer recommended above, is that they expect you to be storing all your "pictures" in one location. I've got images all over the place, on 3 separate drives even. I need to be able to access them easily.

I also tried a program called JPegger which also has no address bar. File browser panel, yes, but no address bar. My images are located deep in the directory structure and I really hate having to go through a file browser to get there. It doesn't look like Picasa has one either

Megan;221903 wrote: I also found XnView, which mostly suits my needs but does a few annoying thing (like put drop shadows on the thumbnails, what a waste of resources).

.... and, puts a big database file in my profile space That's going to give me trouble later... better try something else now! This shouldn't be so difficult!!

webwiz — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 05:21:01 +0000

Google's Picasa indexes all your images. Thumbnails are shown on a per folder basis, and are resizable via a slider control. The folder display at the side is customizable, showing as just a list or as a hierachy similar to explorer. Right click on a folder to "locate on disk" and the folder opens in explorer.

There are some elementary editing functions - crop, tilt, redeye correction, adjust contrast or color, and an effects filter. Double click the thumb to edit the original. Of course there's a slide-show, but I imagine that's not what you are after.

May be worth a look.

Megan — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:20:03 +0000

That would be good if it had an address bar! Hello, it's a picture browser, don't you think I might want to type in a directory location ? Noooo-o, of course not. (not you, Microsoft, of course)

Some of the other ones I tried have the same problem, and a few actually have an address bar that doesn't accept inputs!

pr0gr4mm3r — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:03:26 +0000

MS Picture Manager comes with MS Office 2003.

Megan — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:57:31 +0000

Thanks, I'll try MS picture manager. Where do I find that? I'm not sure I've seen that one before... unless it's the one that mysteriously won't work on my computer.

I also found XnView, which mostly suits my needs but does a few annoying thing (like put drop shadows on the thumbnails, what a waste of resources).

pr0gr4mm3r — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:29:18 +0000

Oops, when you said, "a few image editing options (reisze/crop etc.)", I thought you wanted to create thumbnails...not just view them. Sorry bout that.

MS Picture Manager will still help you out though if you have it because you can zoom in/out with your thumbnail views.

Google Picasa also have thumbnail views, but I don't think you can only view them in two sizes.

Megan — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:27:42 +0000

Um, I'm not looking for resizing (??? not sure where you got that idea from). I just want to change the size of the thumbnail previews, not the images themselves.

I did try FastStone image viewer but you can't (easily) resize the thumbnails. In my file manager in Ubuntu (embarassingly can't remember which one I'm using! :blush:, you can zoom in on the icon view. That's all I need, unfortunatley haven't been able to find something that does that yet).

The programs I've found so far seem to have all kinds of extra features other than resizeable thumbnails. Annoying

pr0gr4mm3r — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:08:03 +0000

Do you have MS Office 2003? MS Picture Manager is sweet for modifying images in bulk. There is also an Image Resizer on MS's Powertools Page.

If you have Ubuntu on a computer, there is a Nautilus Script that resize images in bulk as well. That's here.