Use custom thumbnails instead of Phoca generated thumbnails

[highcountryrider]

New to group and Phoca Gallery. We will be using Phoca Gallery on our updated Joomla 2.5 website. I've read most of the Phoca Gallery documentation and done searches for the issue I am posting but can't seem to find any information about it.

I would like to use custom thumbnails, sized 200x133 pixels, that have been cropped and corrected in Photoshop. The Phoca generated thumbnails will not work for us because they crop some of the images (vertical ones especially) so that the thumbnail is not representative of what the full size image looks like.

Is there a way to have Phoca Gallery use the custom sized and cropped thumbnails I have created and still point to the full size image? I would assume I would have to upload the custom thumbnails to somewhere in the gallery and then modify a setting or particular section of code to use that thumbnail instead of a Phoca generated thumbnail.

As stated I have attempted to search this forum and also the documentation for an answer to my question but all I seem to find is turning thumbnail generation on or off, use small, medium, large thumbnails, etc.

TIA for any advice.

[Jan]

Hi,

Phoca Gallery creates thumbnails automatically, but this can be disabled.

I think the best way is:

Load the original images, let Phoca Gallery create thumbnails and then stop automatically creating of thumbnails in Options.

See the thumbnail names - in phocagallery/some-category/thumbs/ and just rename your thumbnails to these names and overwrite them e.g. per FTP.

Jan

[highcountryrider]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I've done the FTP downnload of thumbs, re-did the crops of some vertical images, renamed them, uploaded and overwrote the existing thumbs and that worked fine to correct some of the cropping problems. I used the _l_ thumb generated by Phoca, redid the crop, re-sized to 100x100 pixels, gave it the same name as the existing _m_ thumb.

So I can use my 200x133 pixel thumbs, rename it to phoca_thumb_m_imagename.jpg (name of existing 100x100 thumb), upload it and it will replace the existing 100x100 thumb? What about the shadow effects, etc., do I have to change them to fit the new size and also I assume I will have to do this to all the 100x100 thumbs, correct?

[Jan]

Hi, depends on version you are using. You can set the 200x133 size in Options for the medium thumbnails and then in Themes you can create own background images:
https://www.phoca.cz/documents/2-phoca-g ... ound-image
Or you can do it per CSS

Jan

[highcountryrider]

OK, thanks for the information. I think I will experiment with that. The downloading, recropping, renaming of the _l_ thumbnail method works pretty well for the 100x100 (medium) thumbs and doesn't take that long.

It looks like the _l_ thumb is created by Phoca using the parameters of the Options>Main>Images And Detail Window Size Settings>Large image width and height, is this correct? So if my original image size is 800x600 and the above parameter is 640x480 would I reset the Large image width & height parameter before uploading and creating thumbs to produce larger _l_thumb images? Right now my original vertical (portrait) images are about 550 - 600 pixels high and they are being resized to 450 pixels high in the _l_thumb.

Thanks for the help with this.

[Jan]

Hi, yes, they are managed by these parameters - you should set the parameters before you add the images to system.

Jan