Change engine of thumbnail generator

[krzysiu]

Hey! It's very similar to http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14022, yet different. Mr Donald said "However, not now. There are some other things on my list...", so treat is as some idea, not something I want now. It would be nice to have it someday, tho!

"Pre-idea": it could be another additional feature in pro.

Idea:
Ability to choose imagemagick as external engine for thumbnails.

How it would look?
User can select "use external ImageMagick engine". Now two ways:
a) XYPlorer proposes then to download libraries (ImageMagic dynamic Q8 [8 bit, much faster] 32 or 64, depending on architecture)
b) XYPlorer requires user to download it and user needs to select directory with libraries

The rest would be transparent for user.

Problems
* speed - IM Q8 from cmd line is faster than engine of XYPlorer, yet I'm not sure about speed of DLL + adding it to XYPlorer database. So it could be actually lower.
* version - IM 6 will be supported for a long time, I guess, yet there's IM 7 still in alpha, which isn't 100% backwards compatibile. I'm talking about cmd, I don't know about DLL. If author would add it in one year, there's possibility that IM 7 will still be prerelease.
* errors - incorrect libraries could cause instability. That's why I think that version a) is better. XYPlorer could download exact version of DLL. If user wants to have newer, then it's messing with application and any fault will be purely user's fault. Also amateur users probably won't mess with other versions.

Pros, hooray!
* if it would be in pro, then more cash for author
* formats! Now users says that XYPlorer doesn't support much and it's true. http://www.imagemagick.org/script/formats.php#supported - it could be used for video as well, but at last there would be support for RAW! Other cool and popular formats: PSD, XCF, TTF, DJVU, SVG. Sadly PDF needs Ghostscript, which would made it difficult.
* speed - to be benchmarked, per problems section
* disk space - IM tends to create very small files.

If somebody wants to check it now, please use

Code: Select all

c:\imagemagick\convert.exe input.jpg -thumbnail 500x500 -q 70 output.jpg

, where "c:\imagemagick" is path which is needed (Windows have another tool named convert!) "-thumbnail" resizes photo and strips data like color profiles, Exif, XMP etc. "500x500" is proportional resize, where maximum size will be 500x500 (so 5000x1000 will become 500x100) and "-q 70" is userd for setting quality when there's JPEG output.[/size]

[admin]

I don't know any faster thumbnail machine than XY, and I have all RAW formats support I can dream of.

[highend]

About speed:

Use a folder with let's say 500 jpegs.

Let ImageMagick create 128x96 pixel thumbnails.

Measure the time to create these thumbnails

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In XYplorer
Options - Preview - Thumbnails

[x] Create all thumbnails at once
Quality: High Speed

Make sure both of these are checked

View - Views - Thumbnails #3 (128x96)

Measure the time to create (and show) these thumbnails


What are the values both measurements?

Btw.:
Configuration | Thumbnails | Show thumbnails for RAW files...