anartist

Yup, php thumbs is EXACTLY the kind of solution I'm looking for. Imagemagick comes installed with typo3 and I know it can do this - my problem is - as arelative newcomer to typo3 and their scripting protocols, and as you suggest in your last - how to access (call) the correct parameters is the problem. The object properties for the image table are buried inside the cms because the interface between content and display - being not in the html or directly in the css - is a property of the cms and therefore much more hidden. It is an immensely powerful and flexible system, that is why I'm using it, but b***ered if I can work out how to do it. If I knew how to write the script, and where to call it, my problems would have been solved days ago, but once again, many thanks for your helpful posts.

Hi Bluedreamer, Many thanks for your contribution - really, really helpful in principle. I am going to play around with it and see if I can make it work, but the problem I foresee is that my CMS (typo3) does things in a rather different way than has been the case. Nothing in my site template is 'hard-coded'. What this means is that my site layout is done using tables. Once the regions of the page are defined, everything within the pages - meaning each individual page - gets parsed by a script, wrapped, and passed to the display. The really cool thing about that is that now I have a single template to control layout, I only have to change content for the pages. All of my content presentation (all of it) is through css. The potential problem I have with the code you very kindly provided is that while <ul> is part of html/css, I have no direct access (meaning, I don't know what they are or how to access them) to the tags that typo3 has assigned when I place the full-sized images into the page table. The gallery page is parsed as "page content" - in its entirety. The output is passed to display - it is the same whether I place images or text on the page. It seems to me that your code will work in principle (even though I'm not sure how well all browsers handle overflow) but it isn't as straightforward as simply referring to upload tags (or whatever they are). If someone can tell me how and where to access the content object properties of the image content within typo3, I will be able to easily modify your css script to suit. Other than that, I would prefer to use the image handler to perform the cropping, but many thanks for your help so far. Regards

Hi Pat, Thanks once again for trying to help, but I feel I may not have explained the problem sufficiently. Of course I may have and I simply misunderstand your reply. To try to clarify: Take, say, an image that is 800x600. Take another that is 780x590 and a third that is 806x610. Via my CMS (which happens to be typo3) I create an element within the page body that allows me to add these images. Although typo3 doesn't explicitly label it as such, I believe that adding the 'image' content element to the page simply inserts a table. Using the interface in typo3 allows me to specify an image size, so that the larger images (available for resizing by mouse-over or clicking), means that I can specify, let's say, 180x 130. This sets the size of the box in the table for thumbnails. But the problem is that by default, these slightly different sized originals all get scaled into irregular boxes within the table. The table either expands the width or height dimension to accommodate the larger dimension. The result is that the thumbnails, however they are aligned, end up having space above, below or to the sides. It matters not at all whether the blank space is visible or not. I have been reading, in both the docs for typo3 as well as various websites out there, that most of the image handlers for browsers - because they deal in .gif and .png - can display an image through a "scaled crop". What this means is that, referring to the above example, I can set a thumbnail display size in code, and that any thumbnail that 'exceeds' one of the dimensions, will be 'cropped' in the sense that the extra pixels will not be displayed (and most importantly, the image is not being 'squashed' into the box) and the thumbnails will all fit into nice, regular table rows and columns even though the thumbnails are now not the full image. The point of doing this, and not cropping the original images, is that when click-enlarged, (I'm using Lightbox) the full image and all of the information is displayed. It is important to show the full-sized image (they are paintings) but also important to have an orderly gallery page. I hope this explanation is clearer. Regards Alan

Hi all, I have the final part of my website to finish and it's been driving me a bit nuts over the past few days. I've set up a basic site under typo3 and I have a simple site template so that I can control display and styling via css. Nice and simple and does what I need. I'm not a hugely experienced web designer - I tend to follow instructions and experiment quite a lot and there is one feature of my site that I really want to implement but don't really know how. I have several gallery pages on which I am using lightbox to display the large versions of the images. All well and good. But what I really, really want to happen is for the thumbnail displays on the page to all fit within the same sized display boxes, despite the fact that the source photos are all slightly different sizes, thus allowing the image table to display in nicely aligned columns and rows. It seems that it is possible to write a simple script that will allow the image processing to generate a dynamic crop display wherein I can specify the size for display, and it will crop/mask the thumbnails into the table display. What I don't know is how to code the content object/properties within typoscript for this simple operation. Can anyone please help at all? Even suggest a different way of solving the problem? I've scoured the typo3 docs, but they're all written for advanced users and don't explain object properties and coding in any depth. Thanks

Pat - you are a total genius! Exactly what I was looking for, how cool is that! Thanks. I'll go take a look and see if I can work it out. Regards... One satisfied customer

Evening all, Sorry if I haven't really made a proper introduction, maybe I'll do that later, but for now I'm hoping one of you clever folks can give me some advice. I've done a bit of website design in the past and have just recently set up a domain with typo3 hosting, which I have installed and configured etc. I am some way into designing my site - which is fundamentally to display photos of my paintings (I'm an artist). I have managed to work my way through the typo3 documentation and have edited an HTML template, and managed to edit the CCS master stylesheet, so I feel I now have a good fundamental basis for the site, with the content and presentation kept separate with minimal overlap. This isn't a question specific to typo3 - I mention it because I find it a very powerful yet flexible CMS. I've been doing fine with all the general layout stuff, but I want my gallery pages to be really easy to see and easy to use. I have in mind a means of presentation that I have seen on some other sites. Basically, the viewer clicks on an image on a gallery page, and the image opens in a nice little pop up window on centre screen. Once open, one has the option to either click to close, or in some cases, just click to view next image. The thing I like about such an approach is that there are no 'controls' visible, with all the 'nasty' arrows and 'click this' buttons - just nice and simple and intuitive. So my question to you is: What, in principle, do you feel is the best kind of approach for the kind of presentation I'm looking for? I specifically wish to avoid anything like tables or suchlike embedded in a page since as I paint more pictures, and put more work on the site, I don't want to constantly find myself rearranging static elements in a table. I'm okay at following instructions, design docs and manuals, it's the conceptual side I know very little about, so I don't know what sort of solution I might be looking for. Is it a script? Or would using flash accomplish what I want? Or is there some other way of going about it? Sorry to seem vague - hopefully any answers will help me to ask a better question. Thanks in advance Alan