Associating thumbnail images with files

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You can associate thumbnail images for your files so that a small preview of each file can be displayed alongside the links in your search results.

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Note that Zoom does not generate thumbnail images for you. You will need to have pre-generated thumbnail images hosted on your website. You can then configure Zoom as follows, telling it where to look for these thumbnails and how the files are named accordingly. There are third party applications available which can batch-process a large number of files and generate thumbnails for many image and document formats.

Using this feature, you can configure Zoom to display thumbnails for your image files (indexed using the image plugin as described in "Image indexing"), or even your web pages and PDF documents (so long as you have thumbnail images created for these files).

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Example 1. Displaying thumbnails for your searchable image files.

 
To do this, double-click on the file extension you wish to configure on the "Scan Options" tab of the Configuration window. The options available for that file type will appear in a window. Click on the configure_images_button button. Here you will see the image and thumbnail configuration window for this file type.

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Select the "Display different thumbnails for each file" option. You should now refer to the right side of the window which will be enabled, entitled "Thumbnail options". These options allow you to tell Zoom where to look for your thumbnail images for each URL of this specific file extension.

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Note the example URLs given at the bottom of the window are useful in helping you make sure you have this properly configured. They will change according to your settings, and should give you a good idea of what the end result will be.

The first text box specifies the folder path for which the thumbnail images will be located. The default is "./" which refers to the current directory (of where the indexed file is located). You can specify a relative directory such as "./thumbs" which will tell Zoom that the thumbnail images will be located in a subdirectory named "thumbs", within the same folder that the indexed file is located. As always with relative paths, you can specify the previous directory with "../", etc.

You can also specify an absolute path here. For example, you could specify a path of "http://www.mysite.com/images/" which would tell Zoom that ALL of  your thumbnails will be located in the same folder (regardless of where your actual indexed file is located). This method does mean however, that you will not be able to have different thumbnails for files with the same name but located in different folders.

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Tip: You can also specify a path starting with "/" such as "/images/", which again, will ensure that all of your thumbnails will be located in the same folder by referring to the root directory. This would be a good alternative to the absolute URL if you are hosting your files on a CD/DVD-ROM, and you need all your files in one folder.

 
You can also alter the filename by specifying text the precedes or follows the original filename. This would particularly suit scenarios where you may have thumbnails in the same folder of the document/files being indexed, so a file such as "myphoto.jpg" would have a corresponding thumbnail in "thumb_myphoto.jpg", etc. You can also specify the file extension of your thumbnail images here.

Again, it is important to refer to the example URLs at the bottom of the window, to check if your settings are configured to look for the thumbnails in the correct places.

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Note: If file sizes are not important to you (eg. you are hosting on an Intranet or on an offline medium such as a CD-ROM), you could allow Zoom to use the original images as thumbnails of themselves. You do this by leaving the default thumbnail settings of looking in the same folder as the original image file indexed, and leaving the filename settings blank so that the filename it looks for is the same as the original. This means that it will simply use the original image (resized by the browser based on your CSS) and display them next to your search results.

 

This is not recommended for online websites, because it often means the page will be very slow to load as the original images may be very large. Also, web browsers do not do a particularly good job at resizing images, so these "thumbnails" may appear blocky. In most cases, we would recommend creating proper thumbnails of the original and following the instructions above to use smaller images for thumbnails rather than the original images.

Thumbnail for non-image file formats

As mentioned above, it is possible to setup thumbnails for your non-image file formats such as PDF documents, Word documents, or even your HTML web pages and video file formats. So long as you have these thumbnails generated (using a third party application) and they are hosted on your website with a filename that refers the original file or document, then you can follow the same instructions as above to setup thumbnails for your document and other file formats.

Below is an example of a setup with thumbnails generated for PDF and DOC files.

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Example 2. Displaying thumbnails for documents.