magazine thumbnails

[nocash]

Just wondered if there's a simple way to make a thumb-nail gallery like this:
  http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Amstrad_Computer_User
Unlike a normal "gallery", it does allow to click on the covers, and brings you to a new wiki page (rather than showing a zoomed version of the cover).

The "source code" of the page isn't that difficult, the problem is that it contains things like this:
  http://www.cpcwiki.eu/imgs/4/4e/Acu_aug_sep_1984_small.png
If one would want to do that manually, one would need to do:
  1) download the cover at full size
  2) resample the cover to 70x100 pixels
  3) upload the cover as Cover_small.png
  4) find out the URL for that cover, eg. http://www.cpcwiki.eu/imgs/4/4e/Cover_small.png
      (whereas "/4/4e/" would be randomly assigned by cpcwiki, different for every uploaded file)
  5) insert that URL in the wiki source code
Doing that for magazine covers with 100 issues would be pretty crazy :-(

So, I was wondering if there's a way to do that (or at least parts of it) automatically?

(Like for the german CPC International mags - currently there aren't any hyperlinks to scanned articles - and when adding them, I though it'd be nice to do it as on the ACU page - but now it doesn't look as if it's easy to do that.)

[Gryzor]

The CPC International pages use normal gallery markup. Maybe you could tweak that with the clever coding in the ACU gallery to redirect to local pages instead of the full-sized file...

But, yeah, the ACU has tons of work put into it!

I'll try and check for a gallery extension, but I wouldn't be that optimistic

[nocash]

Found out how to use images as hyperlinks, it's described here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_linking_to_articles
That way it's much easier as it's done on the ACU page, almost as easy as making normal galleries.

If you want to see how it looks like in practice, I've used it here http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Amstrad_Action (english mag, thumbnails with links to some already existing pages), http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/CPC_Schneider_International (german magazine, just the thumbnails, scanned pages aren't uploaded yet) and here http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Amstradbladet (danish magazine, thumbs linking to (almost complete) scanned pages - if someone has the missing pages: Please upload them!).

Before adding similar thumbnail tables to other magazine pages - should there something be altered cosmetically? Like invisble table borders, or centered Year headlines? The thumbnail width (100px in max 5-6 columns) looks quite fine to me (works also in non-fullscreen windows).

[Gryzor]

Heh, you learn something new every day... thanks for sharing

It looks just fine to me, to tell you the truth, I wouldn't change anything! Just maybe, the thumbs should go to the bottom of the page, after the text?

[nocash]

> Just maybe, the thumbs should go to the bottom of the page, after the text?
Yeah, the text is important, too. I think people visiting the magazine pages are most interested in scans, that's why I've put them on top of the page. Anybody who does scroll through the whole page (or looks at the contents list) should find the text section at the bottom. So I hope it isn't hidden too far away.

Something else: For the scanned magazine pages (not the covers), I've experimented with modifying the gallery parameters. The default <gallery> tag uses four 120x120 pix pictures per row. But one can replace it by this <gallery widths=90px heights=128px perrow=5>, producing five 90x128 pix thumbnails per row. Here are two examples:
  http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/ACU_Issue_2,_1984 - <gallery> (default)
  http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/ACU_Issue_1,_1984 - <gallery widths=90px heights=128px perrow=5> ("improved")
The advantage is less blank space between the pages, more pages per line (without requiring a wider browser window), and, 5 pages per row matches better to the decimal page numbering.

What do you think? Adding that on the other magazine pages, too?

The downside would be that <gallery widths=90px heights=128px perrow=5> contains hardcoded numbers, maybe one would someday want to replace "perrow=5" by "perrow=variable" or so (in case that should be supported in future mediawiki versions). I've tried to put the parameters into Template:MagazineGalleryAttributes, and then use it as <gallery {{MagazineGalleryAttributes}}>, but that didn't work. Seems one can't use {{...}} inside of <...>.

But I guess one could use Templates in another way (dunno how exactly).