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AGG is really that easy; you need to:
Or, if you are interested in just resizing pictures (without any galleries etc.), use the Batch resize tool.
1. Introduction
2. System Requirements
3. The project settings
3.1 Gallery Title
3.2 Input/Output directory
3.3 Picture Sizes
3.4 Thumbnail format
3.5 File info
3.6 JPEG Quality
3.7 Text Color, Gallery Background color & Background image
3.8 Font
3.9 Images per row/ multipage gallery
3.10 Rollover thumbnails type
3.11 Add Exif stats (if available)
3.12 Create a .ZIP with all images
3.13 Show when viewing image
3.14 Enhance all images (AutoContrast)
4. File Menu
5. Picture Menu
6. Gallery Menu
7. Tools Menu
8. The main dialog
9. Shortcuts & Hints
AGG is designed with the primary purpose to resize (and eventually rotate) pictures from, e.g., your digital camera and place it in more web-friendly form, much smaller in size and with appropriate thumbnails. With it, posting the pictures from your last trip/vacation/whatever to your website (with the proper resizing and rotating) will cost you less than 5 minutes.
It could be used for many other purposes, too.
AGG should run on any Pentium-class machine with at least 16 MB of system RAM. The application is quite memory-hungry, though; it could eat up lots of megabytes if you operate on large pictures. Since it takes 16 bytes to store a single pixel in AGG's internal format, that means you'd need at least 12MB of RAM just to store a 1024x768 image and, thus at the very least, 32 MB of system memory just to operate on collection of 1024x768 images. Since most big images are generated by digital cameras and the amount of the RAM is proportional to the camera's Megapixels, I've come up with the following formulae:
Needed memory (MB) = Megapixels x 32
This takes into account the fact, that resized pictures also require memory for temporal storage and also the OS overhead.
Anything else in your system would be fine. You'd like to use at least 16bit color mode when dealing with images, and I'd recommend at least 400 MHz processor if you intend to do convert anything bigger than just a few images.
Whenever you create a new project, or select Gallery->Configure on an existing one, you are presented with the "Project Settings" dialog; these settings are global to the project (i.e. to all the pictures). Here's the explanation of each one of them:
Gallery Title
Sets the name that will be displayed in the HTML title tag and in the page's heading. If you leave it empty, AGG will fill it in with the name of the Input directory.
Input/Output directory
The input directory is where your pictures reside; the "Raw" data. Any files besides the JPEGs in that directory are merely ignored.
The output directory is where the HTMLs, the resized pictures and the thumbnails will end up. It may be the same as the Input one, but this will overwrite the original images. For each file "xxx.jpg" in the input directory, AGG creates "xxx.jpg" in the output directory and a thumbnail, named "thumbs/xxx.jpg" (or "thumbs/xxx.png" if you selected PNG thumbnails).
Picture Sizes
The two fields, "Resize pictures to:" and "Size thumbnails at:" command how much your output images will be. E.g. if your input pictures are 1600x1200 or 1200x1600 and you selected "1024", the output pictures would be 1024x768 and 768x1024, correspondingly, since the bigger side is taken when calculating the scaling factor.
NOTE: AGG will never up-scale an image. If an image turns out being smaller than the requested in the configuration dialog value, it won't be resized, but rather just copied. If rotation is needed, it is opened, rotated and saved, but scaling still doesn't occur.
TIP: If you don't want your photos being resized, set the Picture size to a sufficiently large value, like 9999.
TIP: If you just want to add gallery+thumbnails to your images, create a project with Input Dir = Output Dir and set the Picture size to 9999.
Thumbnail Format
You can choose between JPEG and PNG. The JPEG files are usually smaller and load faster. PNGs, while still small, also handle transparency (which could only be needed when creating thumbnails with frame fadeout and custom background). Please note, that in the last case you may have problems with Microsoft Internet explorer (which doesn't handle transparency correctly; They claim it will be fixed in the newest versions, that is, IE7).
File Info
Here you can choose what will be displayed under each thumbnail as text; probably the file's name is best, but you are still given the final decision.
JPEG Quality
This is the quality (scale 1-100), which applies to both rescaled images and thumbnails (if they are JPEG). Generally useful values: 5-95.
Text Color, Gallery background color and background image
These control the text, bgcolor and background properties of the HTML body tag. The color is taken into account when creating JPEG thumbnails with frame fadeout. The color is being blended with the image at its border. Note that if you wish to use a background image as well, it should very closely match the selected background color; in fact, if using any complex background, it is recommended to use PNG thumbnails.
The background image (if you select it) will be copied to the gallery's output folder. Keep in mind it is highly recommended to make the background image smallish, like 50-100K, to keep slow internet users not too nervous.
Text font
This field selects the text font face to be used for the generated gallery. For example, the font face of the text you are reading now is most probably Verdana. Web browsers do not guarantee to be using the exact fonts you tell them; if a particular font is not available, the browser will use the most "similar-looking" font instead.
That's the reason why fonts are grouped like this in AGG's font selection field - every choice is a list of similar looking fonts (we also say they belong to the same family). For example, the choice "Times New Roman, Georgia, serif" contains only Serif fonts, while "Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" contains Sans-serif fonts only. You'd best experiment with this field a bit to see which family matches best your tastes.
If you are still not happy with the "stock" choices from AGG, you can always compose your custom font-list. Choose "Custom..." from the font selection field. A dialog will appear - you can compose your own genuine list now. Keep in mind, that the list is prioritized - the Browser will use the first font he finds installed on the system. Hint: Try selecting the font "Comic sans MS" " if you have it. Some galleries look particularly cool with it.
Images per row and multipage gallery
Images per row controls how many images to put in each table row; note that (Images per row) * (Thumbnail size) = (Optimal screen resolution), since your gallery will be browsable without horizontal scrolling (which is quite annoying). So select this value carefully.
Multipage gallery creates many index.html, index1.html, index2.html and so on files, each storing at most the requested number of pictures. All pages are linked, so browsing is almost as seamless as with one-page gallery. Avoid putting more than, say, 50 images per one gallery page - it gets too much for people with slow internet connections.
Rollover thumbnails type
Rollover thumbnails are purely optional; if you wish to use them, this will add some effect to the thumbnail, which is currently under the cursor. This option controls what kind of effect to apply, here is the list of effects:
- None - No effect (no rollover thumbnail creation);
- Hilight - Apply more brightness to the thumbnail;
- Change opacity - The thumbnail that is under the mouse will be 100% opaque; all others will be 20% transparent;
- Both - Apply both of these effects :)
Add Exif stats (if available)
This will add a simplistic HTML page with Exif statistics. This is probably worthless if you are not a keen photographer, or you have some very simple (or old) digital camera. So this feature is intended for SLR-like and dSLR camera owners. The page will contain histograms for usage of following image shooting settings:
- Shutter speed;
- Aperture (also known as F-stop);
- ISO speed (a.k.a. ASA number);
- Focal length
(AGG will try to use 35mm film equivallent focal length value. If image Exifs don't contain enough info to properly determine 35mm eqv. focal length, the true focal length is used instead)The Exif stats page is only generated if enough information is available (at least two images that contain at least ISO, Aperture, Shutter or Focal length data). If the page is generated, AGG will put a link to it in the main gallery page.
A last note: If you like this feature, keep in mind, that AGG is not created for this exact purpose - there are some very good programs that will do Exif statistics on a bunch of images and display it in a human friendly format. A good program that does this is ExposurePlot (which is not connected to AGG in any way).
Create a .ZIP with all images
If specified, AGG will create a .ZIP file with all images from your gallery. Note that, while very useful, this feature will nearly double the required gallery storage space. If the file is generated, AGG will put a link to it in the main gallery page.
Show when viewing image
This option specifies whether you want to be able to browse the images one-by-one via a dedicated "viewer" page. The default option "Prev/Next buttons" enables the viewer as a simple page with navigataion buttons. "Prev/Next & EXIF info" will also show the EXIF metadata for the image in a table. "None" option is the pre-0.2.2 behaviour, where the index page links to the images directly.
Enhance all images (AutoContrast)
If this is specified, all images will be preprocessed by applying auto contrast to them. It is performed by analyzing the image and normalizing the intensity in the [0..1] range. This works well for scanned images, for photos through fog or great distances, where contrast usually diminishes. Please note, that this feature will probably do a good job in most cases, but is no match for professional software. If you don't want to enhance all images, you can do it selectively from the Picture menu (with the Auto Contrast and Auto Levels options).
AGG uses Project files to store your current setup - the number of images, their locations, the settings and the per-image rotations. It is advisable to store the project file for each gallery you create since, for example, if you aren't satisfied with something (and this happens two days later), you could load the Project file, fix the parameter you wish and then just regenerate the gallery.
New Project...
Essentialy, brings the Project settings dialog. Clears the currently loaded project, so it's wise to save it before creating new project.
Open Project...
Opens a stored Project file (with .agg extension). The Project files are textual and very straightforward. Please note, that the Project files are inoperable between Linux and Windows because of the File systems fundamental differencies between these OSes.
Save Project
Save your current settings to a filename of your choice.
Save Project as...
Save the current settings of the project to a different filename.
Preferences...
Allows you to set up some details of AGG's operation in general. Here are the options you have:
- Use multiple processors/cores (if available)
AGG will try to utilize your processing resources if you have more than one processor (or a multicore one). HyperThreading is also supported. Multiple threads are used for image loading, resizing and writing, speeding up the entire processing. For example, the speedup for a dualcore processor is nearly twice compared to a single-core one;- Swap mouse buttons for image ops
If turned on, right mouse button will mean "next image", left will be "rotate CCW", the opposite of the default behaviour;- Use advanced instruction sets (if available)
If available, SSE instruction set will be used for image resizing. Generally, if the program works, you need never to turn off this option;- Preserve Exif metadata in output images
This option will disable writing of Exif metadata in output images. Other Exif-related work will still be done;- Sort images by Exif Date (if available)
This will turn on sorting the images by Exif Date. This is especially useful if image filenames are broken, or if you are assembling the photos from some event, and you are gathering image files from several digital cameras. The photos will be ordered chronologically, provided that Exif Date field is set correctly by all cameras (so be sure to synchronize their clocks. If you allready got the images and some clock is wrong, use the Time Offset feature). Since the sorting requires some setup time and is not-so-frequently required, the option is turned off by default.- Resize quality
This option allows you to select the algorithm to be used for image resizing. The available algorithms are discussed here.- Thumb resizer
Same as above, but applies to the algorithm for resizing images to thumbnails. (the difference is that you may not want to use the same algorithm for resizing the gallery images and for the thumbnails. E.g. lanczos is perfect for the images, but not quite for the thumbs; in practice, you'd rarely want to use anything than "Area" for the thumbnails).- HTML Charset
Windows only: This selects the charset to use in the HTMLs. Set this to your encoding when using, e.g. german, cyrillic, chinese ... characters in file names or gallery title, etc.
Rename/Annotate
This allows you to change current file's name and output size. If don't want to resize this particular image, just set the "Resized Resolution" to 9999;
Exif info
Shows a big table with the full EXIF metadata from the image (if available);
Quick Exif info
This shows a small dialog with the &most important& Exif info fields;
Auto Contrast
This option enhances the current image by maximizing its contrast;
Auto Levels
This option enhances the current image by maximizing the contrast of each channel. Usually this corrects color bias (fixes white balance). Don't use both Auto Levels and Auto Contrast.
Configure
Just brings up the Project Settings dialog. You won't be able to change the source directory, though.
Create Preview...
This option creates a preview of the whole gallery - i.e. it writes the HTMLs and thumbnails so you can preview them in your browser, and when you are happy with the way it looks you can finally generate the whole gallery (since the actual rescaling happens then, and it is quite time-consuming, compared to HTML and thumbnail creation).
Time Offset...
This brings up the time offset management dialog. For more details, see here.
There are two utilities in this menu. The Batch Rename is used for renaming a bunch of files according to some rule. The Batch Resize is used for resizing a whole hierarchy of image files. See their pages for more info.
After creating a new project or loading existing one, the main window is "brought to life" and here's what you can do:
Prev - One image back; shortcut: Alt-P.
Rotate CCW - Rotate 90 degrees counter-clockwise; shortcut: Alt-R.
Next - Go to the next image; shortcut: Alt-N
Save - Saves the current Project as an .agg Project file.
Generate Gallery - Performs full rescaling & rotation, writes out thumbnails and HTMLs.
Thumbnail frame fadeout tick - you can choose to use this AGG "coolness" or not. If it's on, the preview in the window is exactly how the image will look in the gallery.
Exclude from Gallery tick - If checked, the current image won't be included in the gallery. This still doesn't mean it would be deleted, even if Source Dir = Dest Dir.
The Mouse Wheel - changes the currently previewed image;
Left Mouse Button - goes to the next image;
Right Mouse Button - rotates the image CCW;
Left, Right Arrows - changes the current image
F2 - Opens the rename/annotate dialog, where you can rename the current picture or select different (nondefault) output resolution;
F3 - Reads all Exif metadata for the current image and displays it;
F4 - Displays a brief summary of Exif data (shutter speed, aperture, ISO speed and focal length);
F5 - Applies Auto Contrast to the current image;
F6 - Applies Auto Levels to the current image;
F8 - Brings the Time offset dialog;