Hello. Rather then have ZenPhoto automatically make my thumbnails for me, I want to use my own already cropped, square thumbnail images. The large images I'm trying to upload are all different sizes, but the thumbnails have all been cropped into squares.

I searched the forum and found out that I can upload new thumbnails into the cache folder myself. But when I tried this, ZenPhoto maintained the dimensions of the larger, not perfectly square images. I checked the theme options and it appears I cannot set the exact width and height of the thumbnail, which I think would fix the issue.

Is there anything I can do about this? I don't want to have to recrop the images all over again in ZenPhoto, if possible.

Thanks

You can do this, but you will need to pay attention to details. Zenphoto normally creates the thumbnails in the cache folders. They are named based on the parameters you have setup for such things as cropping, watermarks, etc.

What you need to do is setup your site and see what the naming convention for the thumbnails is for your particular case. Then you can name the custom thumbnails to match and place them in the cache folders.

Of course, do NOT clear the cache, or your custom thumbnails will be removed!

An alternative approach would require you modifying your theme. You could place your custom thumbnails in a parallel strutur to the albums. Then in place of using the Zenphoto thumbnail functions you could create a url to your custom ones.

Also, not to forget, Zenphoto has the ability for you to specify your own thumbnail via the backend. This way you're still selecting your thumbnail properly and getThumbImage should pull it.

Thanks for the quick replies!

sbillard: When did what you recommended, in the default theme, it did replace the images, however it left the size of the thumbnail in the gallery the same, stretching my thumbnail to fit. So I had a square thumbnail stretched into a rectangle proportionate to the full image. Hope that makes sense. Can I do anything to fix that?

michaell: I didn't see an option to specify my own thumbnail in the administrative area... Where is this option exactly?

Well, of course, you have to set the thumbnail options to EXACTLY MATCH the thumbnails you upload otherwise you will get this problem.

There is not option to specify a specific thumbnail, only for custom cropping it.

I have set "thumbnail size" to 199, and my thumbnails are 199x199.

The issue is the full images are not squares, so thumbnail size seems to be only sizing one side as 199. If I could set the width and height separately, I think this could be easily fixed.

Here is a link so you can see what I mean:
http://www.lesliebender.com/art/paintings/

So I'm not sure what I just did, but after a lot of fiddling it seems to be fixed. It might be because I had cropped image unchecked before, and just checked it? Whatever, happy to see it seems to have worked! Thanks for all the help...

That'd do it. Glad you got it worked out.