Preview HTML Settings

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In the lower right corner of all the Settings Tabs is a button called Preview HTML Index Settings.

This feature allows you to quickly Preview your html index settings without having to process your archive first. It doesn't preview your selected files, it uses a special folder based 'template' to generate the contents of the preview index. There is a new folder in Archive install folder to hold this template called PreviewSrc….

Basically, when you press the html preview button, instead of building images based on your selection, it builds images based on the contents of the PreviewSrc folder. It will build an index of what ever files and folder it finds there. If you place raw files, the normal raw processing will be done. New folders can be added as desired to fully preview how the html index will look. Again, this is not designed to preview your selection, but to preview your html settings.

When using the preview, it uses a temporary, completely separate working environment to process the index so that the normal image cache and index setting comparison is not affected. For example, if you have processed 1000 images normally with drop shadow turned on, then you do an html index preview with drop shadow turned off. Then go back and turn drop shadow on again and process your 1000 images, the normal image cache and index settings should not have been tampered with and the 1000 images should not be reprocessed.

To make the preview generation even faster, we make use of .plh files and the HTML preview image setting option. Basically, when processing a preview, any time a file with a .plh (placeholder) extension is found, the image file specified in the HTML Preview image setting is used instead. The .plh files are place holders for this image. This image is only processed once and used in place of all .plh files. So many files and folders can be added to the Preview Src folder and as long as the files have .plh extension, the process will be very fast (since it only processes the image once. ) Of course, as before, any file can be added to the directory tree and will be processed normally. Also, once processed, they are stored in the preview image cache will also be reused as long as no image based settings are changed.