Typically (this is what I use it for and why I wrote the program), you accumulate lots and lots of digital pictures and you need to label them and sort them out. Perhaps also you have family and friends that speak different languages. This program lets you very easily make picture albums and have them show in one or more languages.

You can customize almost everything in the way the albums look on the screen, from the size of the thumbnails to the background and foreground colors, the border colors, whether you want film-strips, etc.

Cthumb is fully hosted now at sourceforge. get the cvs head for the very latest. Join the development list for contributions or ideas!

See examples: ithumb oak spotlight flaps crosshair float-medium classic-clips classic tv tv-large slides-clean postcard, float-thick, float-more, float, blue-steel, shiny-tube, film, neat-round, neat-square, simpleframe, slides-huge, slides-small, slides-big,

• as a convenient RPM file (230Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (350Kb),
• or as a tarball (350Kb).
• the examples tarball (1.1Mb - from version 4.0) are optional and shipped separately.

Here is what is new. Many thanks to Terry Gliedt and Artur Kedzierski!:

• shorten long titles and descriptions to 50 chars.
• join lines that end in '\'.
• parse_option loop optimizations.
• add HtmlExtension variable.
• add -H option for listing all variables available and where they apply.
• cut down long commentaries.
• fix InlineFiles bug, should work now.
• fix diff issue for solaris.
• themes/{ithumb,spotlight}.theme/theme.conf: link color fix
• themes/oak.theme/theme.conf: change default color from white to visited link.
• fix for the AutoSlideTime. changed it to default to 2 seconds.
• correct wrong capitalization of doctype tag.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (230Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (350Kb),
• or as a tarball (350Kb).
• the examples tarball (1.1Mb - from version 4.0) are optional and shipped separately.

Here is what is new:

• cleanup, adding with back arrows and positioning them correctly.
• help recognize when comments start with html code.
• change doctype so that mozilla renders without small artifacts around tables.
• make automatic album generation (cthumb -c *.jpg) more robust by generating only some parameters that are really needed, and in the right order.
• small bug fixes for stability.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (230Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (350Kb),
• or as a tarball (350Kb).
• the examples tarball (1.1Mb) are optional now and shipped separately.

Here is what is new:

• Two new themes: oak, ithumb.
• Improved docs, really stable, more configurable.
• ImageMagick support, Exif support, better support for FreeBSD and other unices.
• Support for long stories for pictures, support for redhat 7.2, use locale for dates/times, etc.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (230Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (350Kb),
• or as a tarball (350Kb).
• the examples tarball (1.1Mb) are optional now and shipped separately, by request.

Here is what is new:

• Internal re-doing of system. Thanks to Thomas Hammer for the patch!
• NOTE: no more same-line comments in albums allowed!

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (230Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (350Kb),
• or as a tarball (350Kb).
• the examples tarball (1.1Mb) are optional now and shipped separately, by request.

Here is what is new:

• some encoding of urls were missing in the bulding of the slide pages
• forgot to add the spotlight theme to the rpm spec
• found a bug in the slide generation, where the alt field for the image wasn't cleaned enough from html and other possible debris.
• automatic slide shows! (turned off by default, $AutoSlideShow=1 to turn it on) yet another very nice patch by Artur Kedzierski
• fix font in the individual pages to print at the same color/size as the picture title.
• new theme spotlight.
• added patch for inlining headers and footers if they exist, instead of server includes, by Thomas Hammer
• change cp -a to rsync -av, this has the added benefit of being efficient when copying only what is necessary and also copying new files.
• move 1x1 spacer to each of the themes directory.
• do not generate/update html files if they don't change! by Artur Kedzierski

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (230Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (350Kb),
• or as a tarball (350Kb).
• the examples tarball (1.1Mb) are optional now and shipped separately, by request.

Here is what is new:

• slides fixed for multiple-language albums, by Artur Kedzierski.
• fix encoding or urls, by Artur Kedzierski also.
• remove examples from tar file by request, yell if you want them back (makes the distribution 75% smaller), requested by Michael Banck.
• he also mentioned that debian packages are available.
• new theme: flaps, inspired from some frame spotted in the wild.
• NOTE: remember to delete theme directories and re-run cthumb so that the new arrows show up.
• the usual minor fixes and improvements.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (200Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (1.3Mb),
• or as a tarball (1.3Mb).

Here is what is new:

• slides! each picture is displayed in a page of its own! Great contribution from Brent Schwan!
• unlimited resolutions per image suported (cthumb will create them!). Another great contribution from Brent Schwan!
• each slide has title, previous, next and album buttons.
• print empty space in place of empty pictures/frames for the pages where the last row had empty space. in some browsers (notably mozilla) it (correctly) displayed a background-colored rectangle for each space, which looked awful.
• several other minor fixes and improvements: caching of images, html, improved command line options, etc.
• one new bug: in multiple languages, secondary languages are (in some circumstances) linked to the first language.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (200Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (1.3Mb),
• or as a tarball (1.3Mb).

Here is what is new:

• added some html to make the no-empty-thumbnail feature work for internet explorer as well as netscape (IE was diplaying a big ugly black hole instead of the background color)
• added (per Ying Zhang contrib, thanks!): TitleFont, TitleFontSize, TitleFontColor, CaptionFont, CaptionFontSize, self explanatory, all of them themable! cool!
• added contrib directory. two scripts there to manage _large_ directory trees of pictures and make albums out of them.
• if the index file does not change, then don't overwrite it (better http caching)
• handle recursive albums more precisely
• introduced CPR variable in Makefile.in for recursive cp, for BSD folks and others

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (200Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (1.3Mb),
• or as a tarball (1.3Mb).

Here is what is new:

• do not encode text for titles - HTML now allowed in titles! (it was always allowed in the comments, btw)
• remove cruft from alt tags - they should look much better now.
• do not generate empty frames, thanks to Ben Elliston !
• minor buglet fixes.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (200Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (1.3Mb),
• or as a tarball (1.3Mb).

Here is what is new:

• Six more themes!: tv-large, tv, classic, classic-clips, float-medium, crosshair.
• Minor tweaks.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (160Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (900Kb),
• or as a tarball (900Kb).

Here is what is new:

• Recursive albums! i.e. make albums that contain albums that contain albums, etc., all from a single cthumb command line.
• Several fixes (see ChangeLog).
• New ThemeDir variable to consolidate directories for themes (provides a space savings if you reuse themes a lot, like me)
• Changed DisplaySize variable to DisplayKbytes
• Added DisplayGeometry and DisplayFileDate variables to (optionally) show the geometry and the date of the picture.
• Improved theme support.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (160Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (900Kb),
• or as a tarball (900Kb).

Here is what is new:

• More Themes! ... 7 of them: shiny-tube, blue-steel, float, float-more, float-thick, postcard, slides-clean
• Lots of fixes.
• Version 3.1 went out with a bug in page-generation mode.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (125Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (800Kb),
• or as a tarball (800Kb).

Here is what is new:

• Themes!
• header.html and footer.html are autodetected. this is done via server-size includes. if at the time you run cthumb you have any of those files, an "include" of them is rendered in the index. will do all the pages later. note that in order for this to work on apache, i had to call the index as index.shtml, not index.html (or whatever.shtml, it has to have a ".shtml" extension. anyone know why?). for this you use: MainIndexName: index.shtml in the album.
• The comments in Page (<comments>) are passed to the page itself. Typically, this is for the date.
• More README docs.
• Bunch of bugs squished.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (21Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (113Kb),
• or as a tarball (110Kb).

Here is what is new:

• Slowly transitioning to sourceforge.
• Fixed a bug where DisplaySize and CheckThumbnails were not parsed if present in album files.
• Added option -t to turn on checking of the thumbnail width and height so that rendering is much faster on very large pages, but makes cthumb slow. Spent some time optimizing this.
• Keep a cache of thumbnail sizes - this provides a nice speedup when several languages are done.
• Man page, new README file with all sorts of details.
• Minor bug in album-building mode fixed, setting the default title for pages, cleanup of the link surrounding the thumbnails. The new variable $LinkSize, determines that too, by default.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• as a convenient RPM file (17Kb), plus some required perl modules, which I am making available locally for your download convenience (70Kb, download only if you don't have them installed already).
• or as a source RPM (113Kb),
• or as a tarball (110Kb).

Here is what is new (next in line in themes, btw. collaborators accepted :):

• Added new "LinkSize" attribute for albums. Determines the size of the link surrounding the thumbnails. The new variable $LinkSize, determines that too, by default.
• Added an option -k, to do text captions under the thumbnails, suggested by Steve Beach. There is also the option "TextCaptions" to be used in the album file, and also you can put $TextCaptions=1 in your ~/.cthumbrc as usual.
• Fixed a bug so that when NoMainIndex is true, no back arrows are generated.
• Changed defaults so that all variables in the album file match the program variable names, so they can be assigned in ~/.cthumbrc. See the included cthumbrc.sample.
• Fixed a couple of minor mismatches in the alink and vlink colors.

Enjoy it and send bug reports, comments, patches, etc..

• Bugfix for background color with in no-film-strip mode (thanks for Irving Wolfe for pointing it out).
• A couple of other minor bug fixes and code cleanup.

• Several new commands allowed in the album file: MainIndex to provide the name of the index file generated, NoMainIndex to prevent cthumb from generating an index file.
• Major cleanup of HTML code.
• Introduced a little back button in each page that takes you to the index file. This is helpful, and in anticipation to provide previous-top-next set of buttons.
• Several bugs fixed: midly incorrect HTML tables, fonts, other minor typos and HTML typos.

• You can now put your defaults in a ~/.cthumbrc.
• If there is a thumb/ directory, the thumbnails are put there to avoid clutter (patch submited by Irving Wolfe).
• Supports tiff files now (patch submited by Irving Wolfe).
• Can create (-c) default albums in multiple languages now.
• Fixed a couple of minor bugs

• New really nifty "film" mode.
• Maximum configurability: use of CSS (cascading style sheets) in the output HTML makes for extremely configurable picture albums.
• Multiple languages (one or more, not just one or two).
• Better 1-language output.
• New option (-c)to create an album out of a series of pictures to get you going. Very useful to get started very quickly!
• Names of the pictures now in the alt tag of the image for more compact and more user-friendly albums.
• Thumbnail size, background colors, and all sorts of configuration via command line or album file.
• Optional generation of main index of all pages generated in all different languages.