dynamic thumbnailing

[kingqueen]

Hi

My Yawcam sends images to my website at http://www.wetherbyweather.org.uk/webcam.htm. It does so every 9.5 mins (closer to 10 when actually done.) webcam00000.jpg is always the most recent one, but it keeps up to webcam00150.jpg. When a new image is uploaded, it replaces webcam00000.jpg which becomes webcam00001.jpg and so on down the line, webcam00150 being replaced and deleted. That way, there is something in the order of 24 hours of files up on the site.

I want to have the ability to view images from the last 24 hours. My current "solution" is to have the twelve items webcam00012, webcam00024 ... webcam00144 shown, i.e. about one image every 2 hours. They're shrunk by the HTML code (i.e. whole image loaded by the browser, but rescaled by the HTML) and put in a table. Each one is hotlinked to webcam000XX.jpg.

This isn't very good. Firstly it's not good that the full-size images are loaded; 13 for the page (including the "current" one.) Secondly it's not good that each image when clicked on takes the browser to the bare image without any page navigation etc. Thirdly it's only possible to select 12 of the 150 images, there might be nice ones inbetween.

I'm looking for a software solution to this. I've been googling. Existing thumbnail scripts seem to create a thumbnail for (say) webcam00012.jpg and keep it - but this isn't good because webcam00012.jpg will change in 9.5 to 10 minutes. Also regrettably I am not capable of programming my own or doing anything other than tinkering with existing scripts.

Any thoughts and recommendations would be very gratefully received!

cheers and all the best to everybody

[beteljuice]

It can be done (thumbnails) with php, but a little clunky because in this case the thumnails need to be created through the page call in order to ensure they are the same as the current 'stack'.

... also because you don't really know how to code your presentantion / links (yet ) - you would probably be better off with one of the many (free) gallery / slider 'presenters'.

Here's one at random, I have no experience of it, but it seems promising ..

http://wowslider.com/

[kingqueen]

Thanks very much - I'll give that one a try.

Plus you're a bit of a legend on here from all I've been reading - thanks to all the stuff you've been doing, much of which has appeared in my weather website!

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