Creating thumbnails


Q I am creating my first personal Web page and have lots of images. How do I set up thumbnails, so that when a visitor clicks on the image, they are shown a larger version on another page? I'm using both FrontPage Express and HTML codes.

- Katherine Seach

A As everyone knows, few things are more annoying than waiting for enormous image files on a Web page to load. Providing thumbnail image links to larger images elsewhere on your Web pages is one of the most considerate things you can do for people who visit your site. It not only reduces the size of some of your pages and makes them load faster, but it also puts visitors in control by letting them choose what they want to see. And thatÆs a surefire way of increasing the chances that they will react positively to your site.

You can link thumbnails on one page to larger images on a different page using a variation of the common <A HREF> link. For example, suppose you have two files. Thumb1.gif is the image you want to use as a thumbnail; bigpic1.gif is the file that contains the larger picture. In the page that will contain the thumbnails, create the link

<A HREF="Thumb1.gif"><IMG SRC="bigpic1.gif"></A>.

Then, in the page that will contain the larger images, create the tag <IMG SRC="bigpic1.gif">. Thumb1.gif is now linked to bigpic1.gif, and you have hung the first picture in your online gallery! To kill the blue border around the thumbnail image, just add the BORDER=0 attribute to the <IMG> tag on the thumbnails page, so that the link becomes:

<A HREF="Thumb1.gif"><IMG BORDER=0 SRC="bigpic1.gif"></A>.

- Belinda Taylor


Category:Internet
Issue: April 1999

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