topic Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing) in Alfresco Archive

wish list (thumbnail viewing)

hololi — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 08:47:03 GMT

Hi all I am evaluating alfresco for use as a document repository and I must say I like what I see.I am trying to get away from the file server "rubbish bin" method of storing documents but do not want to go with sharepoint/knowledgeTree etc.. as my specific needs are the storage of images. (reposito

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

derek — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:16:44 GMT

Hi,

We have this feature down as a nice-to-have and would, given time, write it. Whether we'll get the time will rely on demand.

I guess there are two sides of this. The generation of the thumbnail and the display.

The thumbnail could be autogenerated by the server by adding a rule that adds a thumbnail aspect when image content is added or modified. The behaviour associated with this new aspect will be to convert the content into a thumbnail.

The display of the thumbnail will require a thumbnail view in the client, and will make use of the thumbnail aspect, where present.

That is the high level summary. On the server, there will have to be some rules and conditions added to detect image mimetypes and image size, etc. The image conversion functionality is already present in the form of ImageMagick wrappers. After chatting with Roy, I guess this is about 2 days' work. Kevin estimates the additional client view to be about 1 day's work.

If you choose to write it, we'll help as much as we can.

Regards
Derek

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

thaneshk — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:44:24 GMT

Derek,

On this regard would the thumbnail that is rendered need to be stored as part of the repository as well.

Have you been able to carry out this funciton. If so could you elobrate more in detail please.

Another question i would like to pose is seems like when you use image magick directly it stores the image in a temporary folder. Does the interface jmagick use this as well.

Thank You

Thanesh

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

derek — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 10:12:18 GMT

Hi,

The ImageMagick conversion does not store the image in a temporary folder. The conversion makes use of 2 temporary files to do the conversion, but the result is then copied to the final storage location. The temporary files are cleaned up.

No, we don't have thumbnails, yet. It is a future task.

It would probably be better to store the thumbnail in the repository. The thumbnail generation time will inhibit the page rendering too much. The storage overhead will not be significant.

Regards

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

derek — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 11:19:41 GMT

Hi,

Why not have a go at enabling the JMagick transformer? Also, see how it deals with VM memory consumption during processing of large images.

There are other image libraries available as well and writing a transformer is pretty simple. Ideally, try to find an image processor that manipulates streams directly. This will be the best combination.

Regards

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

rgauss — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:22:48 GMT

I know this is an old thread but:

http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/thumbnails/

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

czaveri — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:11:15 GMT

I don't know what's the status of thumbnails as of now. But in case it is pending because of inadequate demand… please add my vote for this feature. :wink:

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

paulhh — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 17:07:55 GMT

Hi

There is a project in the Forge that uses ImageMagick to place a transform in the repo and link it to the original, and an update to the UI to view it.

We'd like to get something in the core product around thumbnails, it's just a question of when.

Also, I'm more interested in seeing the ImageJ library interated into Alfresco.

Cheers
Paul.

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

czaveri — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 12:04:32 GMT

Thanks Paul!

This answers my question.

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

richmitc — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:15:08 GMT

I took the thumbnails out of the forge as noted above. It works! A couple of things I discovered:

1. You need to edit the existing browse.jsp for 1.4 versus just dumping this one in. It apparently changed in the month between the thumbnails release and the 1.4 release. Just look for "thumb".

2. Don't make your rule for "All Items" like you might usually do. The rule doesn't work well on spaces. In fact, don't even do all content. I set a rule for mime type JPEG Image which is my usual. I might add others.

3. Make sure that your Names have extensions e.g. .jpg. The thumbnail creation doesn't work without it.

Enjoy and thanks to the provider!

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

richmitc — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 12:03:17 GMT

Everything was going along fine. Then I noticed that workflow was broken. Whenever I would try to do it, I would get a "Cannot get value for expression (#r.path}' error when I went to the second step in the wizard.

I like (and appreciate the original work on) the thumbnails so that Iwent about to debug it. I checked out the thumbnails code and the 1.4 code from port 3696. I worked to incorporate the 1.4 changes into the thumbnails code and rebuild. Still no joy. Then I found a post (which I can't seem to find again, sorry) that said faces needed to get all beans from one jar. I proceeded to make the thumbnail changes in the repository and web-client projects and rebuild the repository.jar and web-client.jar. I also made the other related changes e.g. no more faces-config-custom.xml. That worked! Now I can setup a workflow. (I am still working to get Group Review to work, but that is a separate subject.)

The question is what do I do with this now? If I am right about the above, the thumbnail changes, at least the bean ones, cannot be in a separate alfresco-thumbnails jar. I don't see how I can check these changes into the Thumbnails project (and don't know how). Also, I am reticent to check them in to the HEAD stream (don't know how there either). If others want to benefit from this in ways other than this post, I would like to help. Please let me know how.

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

rgauss — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:03:57 GMT

We haven't updated the thumbnails forge project for 1.4 beacuse we are going to be changing the structure of the model and how things work a bit at the same time.

We finally have some time again to dedicate to it though and hope to have a new release in the next week or two.

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

richmitc — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:22:11 GMT

Wonderful! It is great stuff! Thank you! As I said, I would be happy to share the changes I made. Based on the errors I was getting, I believed I needed to put the BrowseBean in the same jar as the rest of the beans to get workflow to operate. Anyway, if you are looking for a tester…

Re: wish list (thumbnail viewing)

rgauss — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:05:36 GMT

Thanks to richmitc's testing help, the new thumbnails extension is available:

http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/thumbnails/

The new extension is compatible with Alfresco 1.4 and has undergone several changes including the use of a public service.

Please see the readme for full details.