Herer the help text of the tool:
License:
This software is a personal tool and provided publicly with the hope it might be useful.
Nonetheless it might behave erratically in any possible way.
Please be sure to have a decent backup of you database before using the tool
Motivation:
When using an “Access” type database for Thumbsplus, some day a limit is reached as the database file can't grow to more than 2 GByte in size.
“Compacting” the database will remove unused the information, that still might exist from previously deleted or replaced records, but one day the
database is just full.
TD4Squeezer will reduce the quality (and with that the needed space in the database) for a selected set of thumbnail images.
You can always recreate the full quality of the thumbnail image of one or more files when viewing them, just by hitting “F3” in Thumbsplus.
Usage:
At first you need to take care that the database is not completely full but there is some room for TD4-Squeezer top work with. To provide this, in
ThumbsPlus, you might need to delete the thumbnails of some of your pictures using the “Remove Thumbnail” function. Of course you don't need to delete the
pictures themselves. The files can stay unchanged in the directory.
Next you should compact the database using the “Database” menu in Thumbsplus.
Now you can select a number of files you are not likely to use in the near future and assign them to a gallery. Here, the “Find” menu can be helpful to
select complete directories with their subdirectories, or to select files older than some appropriate date. The default gallery name used by TD4-Squeezer is
“__squeeze” (starting with two underscore characters). It is not recommended to move a huge count of thumbnails in that gallery. This might not be very
handy. Instead you can quickly add files or even delete the gallery and recreate it at any point in time.
After this preparation TD4-Squeezer is started. It will ill reduce the quality of those thumbnail images that are in the gallery (default name “__squeeze”), if
they are bigger than a selectable count of bytes (500, 1000, 1500, or 2000). Hence starting a new squeezing (with the same size) run will only handle this
Thumbnail images that are not already small enough. Depending on the picture content, it might be impossible the squeeze the thumbnail image to the selected size.
In that case the process is stopped with a quality factor of 1 %. Those images will (unsuccessfully) be re-tried with the next run of TD4-Squeezer, if they are
still given in the gallery.
After the thumbnail images hve been squeezed, the database nees to be compressend in ThumbsPlus to finally reduce it's file size .
Details:
The database file is given in a text input field. By default it is “thumbs.TD4” in the same directory as the TD4-Squeezer program file.
The “Find” Button can be used to to locate the database file.
If the “Fake” checkbox is checked the modified information is not written into the database. This way the run for “TD4-Squeezer” can be tested.
If “Pause to watch” is checked each thumbnail picture will be shown in it's original and in its modified state will be shown for half a second. The checkbox
can be toggled while “TD4-Squeezer” is running.
The “Gallery” text field holds the name of the gallery you want to use to select the thumbnails to be squeezed. If this field is empty, all tumbnails that have a size
bigger than the max size will be squeezed. The default gallery name is “__squeeze”
The “max Size (Byte)” selection defines the quality of the resulting thumbnail images. It can be set to 500, 100, 1500 or 2000 Bytes. The default is 1500. The
JPEG quality factor is automatically set to a value that results in a size slightly smaller than the given limit.
The “max Conversion Count” stops the squeezing run after the given number of converted thumbnail pictures.
The “Start” button starts the squeezing according to the given parameters. When running it shows “Abort” and hitting it will stop the squeezing. The
process can be restarted with the same or new parameters if it had stopped because of the Conversion Count limit or the “Abort” button.
The “Count” display shows the current record counter and the cound of found records to be converted (if possible).
The “Converted” display shows the count of thumbnails already squeezed in this run.
In the bottom right corner the current thumbnail picture is displayed in the original and then in the squeezed state.
In the bottom left corner the status display shows the SQL statement used to find the appropriate thumbnails and then for each thumbnail the name,
width, height, JPEG quality (in %), information size (in Bytes) as well in the original as in the squeezed state.