DOCman Secrets: Generating thumbnails

Did you know that you don’t need to worry about creating thumbnails for your images or other documents yourself? All you need is the DOCman Thumbs plugin, which does all the work for you. It’s part of the DOCman Productivity Pack. This video shows how easy it is:

Watch the DOCman Thumbs 1.5 video.

1. After installing, remember to enable DOCman Thumbs in the Plugin Manager
2. You can adjust some settings, for example the thumbnail dimensions
3. Now when you browse the frontend, the thumbnails are generated on the fly for all supported file types (depending on your server setup)
4. If a document already has a thumbnail (for example because you set it manually), it will not be overwritten

Clearing thumbnails

If you want to start over (for example after changing the thumbnail size), you’ll need to clear out the thumbnails.

1. Go to the DOCman Home screen
2. Click ‘Clear Data’
3. Select ‘Thumbnails’ and click the ‘Clear’ button
4. Note that this will clear the thumbnails for all your documents

Advanced use

By default, most server setups have the GD library installed. This will work fine for standard images such as png and jpg. But if you want thumbnails for larger files, pdf’s, movies, and range of other documents, you’ll need to install some libraries, such imagick and ghostscript. If you are not familiar with installing libraries on your server, please ask your system administrator for help. To find out what is already available on your server, go to Help -> System Info -> PHP Information.