If you've been following the tutorials, you now have your Gallery 2 software install and customized. You have also created your first album in your portfolio. But, we just discovered that it has no thumbnail image and therefore the text "No Thumbnail" is displayed as the link that opens the album. This doesn't give a professional impression. So let's make some changes.

Although Gallery will automatically generate a thumbnail image from an uploaded file, we haven't uploaded any files into the Art for Licensing album. Therefore, we will want to manually create a thumbnail for this album. But we don't have any way to upload a thumbnail image and assign it to an album or image. We need that familiar Browse button and upload form. We don't have this because we install the Minimal version of Gallery 2. No problem. We can install a plugin.

The Thumbnail Manager Module plugin will display the upload form and assign an uploaded thumbnail image to an album, such as our album that contains no images. We can also use the plugin to set a default (generic) thumbnail image for non-image items, such as a text document, that we might include in an album. Also, we can use this plugin to assign custom thumbnails to each file type that we will be uploading, such as image, PDF or SWF. Although I doubt that we will want to use a generic thumbnail for images that we wish to license, but we do have that option.

Go to the Site Admin control panel and the Plugins section. Click on the Get More Plugins tab and then the Download Plugin List button. You will see a list of available plugins categorized by purpose. Find the Thumbnail Manager Module listed in the Display section and click Download. Click on the Plugins tab and find the Display section. There you will see that we have the new module installed.

You will see that a new Display section has been added to the bottom of the menu. Click on the Thumbnails link to see the Thumbnail Manager page. There you will see a list of the default thumbnail images. You can change any of these by using the New Setting form at the bottom.

Go back to your Art for Licensing album and click Edit Album. Under the General tab, we now have a Custom Thumbnail upload form at the bottom of the page. Now we can upload our custom thumbnail image for the album.