How to Create a Thumbnail Picture Library View in SharePoint 2007
During a ten minute break at a recent SharePoint customization class, Brett Lonsdale shared how I might display images in a datasheet thumbnail view. Thanks Brett! With his knowledge and my curiosity, I took my hurriedly scribbled notes back home and tried it out. After a few bumps and bruises to get it right, it worked, and here’s how to do it!
The SharePoint Picture Library by default does not provide a way to view items in Datasheet mode as a Document Library does. This can be cumbersome if you want to quickly view all images without scrolling though them. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a Picture Library that displays all the images in a Datasheet view as thumbnails thus allowing you to easily navigate to the full size image you would like to see. You will need a copy of SharePoint Designer 2007 in order to make the modifications shown below.
View before Modification
You will create a “Document Library” instead of the normal “Picture Library”. The standard view of document libraries does not lend itself easily to see the image, but only the name.
The Steps:
Step 1: From the Home Page, Select “View All Site Content"
Step 2: On the Quick Launch navigation bar click on “Create” to create a New “Document Library”.
Complete the “Document Library” General Settings as shown below. I selected “None” for a Document Template because I will be placing images in this library instead.
Note: A SharePoint “Best Practice” is to name the Library “Without” spaces and to keep it as short as possible. This name field creates the hyperlink to the library and there is a 260 character hyperlink limit. Adding spaces in this name adds “HTML Encoding” such as a “%20” for spaces and some mail systems may not recognize this when e-mailing links.
Step 3: View of newly created Document Library (No modifications made as yet) But before you move on, upload a few images to the library.
Step 4: Edit the “Document Library” settings
Next, we should edit the library settings and rename the library name to add spaces.
Step 5: Rename Document Library Title to add spaces in Name
You can add your spaces or rename the library here while preserving the hyperlink already created from the initial setup.
Step 6: Changing the “Document Library” name.
Here I added spaces in the name.
Step 7: Select “Advanced Settings”
Step 8: Enable the management of Content Types and remove the “New Folder” menu item from the Library. The Categorization of content in this library will now be managed through Content Types.
Step 9: Create a New Content Type by “Adding from Existing Content Types”
Step 10: Select “Picture” Content Type
Step 11: Select the “Change new button order and default content type” link from the Document Library Settings page.
Step 12: Remove (Hide) the Document Content Type
Uncheck the “Visible” appearance of the “Document” Content Type. We only want “Pictures” to be uploaded into this Library.
Step 13: Create a new View
Now we need to create a new “Thumbnail” view of the Document Library. This will create a new web page that we can modify to display in Datasheet mode.
Step 14: Select “Standard View”
Step 15: Name the new View “Thumbnails” and select your audience type.
Step 16: Select the Columns to Display in this view.
We only want to show the Linked Name of the Document (in this case, the document will be an image). Only check the “Name (linked to Document)” Column
Step 17: Choose the style.
Select the “Newsletter” style. This allows you to navigate down the page vertically only.
After you save your View settings, upload a few pictures into the Library as shown below. The view you just created will only show the Name (Link). What we want to do next is convert this view to show as a thumbnail with links.
Step 18: Open SharePoint Designer
Open SharePoint Designer and navigate to the Site Collection or Site that the Document Library resides in.
Note: You can copy and paste the URL from your browser into SharePoint Designer when you select “Open site” from the file menu.
Open the Thumbnails.aspx page by navigating the folder list to your Document Library, and then open the “Forms” folder.
Notice the Hyperlink Name or URL followed by the Display Name of your Document Library
Step 19: Convert Page to “XSLT Data View”
Since I had already uploaded a few images to the Library, you will see them being represented in the SharePoint Designer Editor, this is a nice touch. Next, right mouse click on the page and select “Convert Page to XSLT Data View” from the content menu.
Step 20: Remove the existing columns and add Name and URL
After converting the Thumbnails view to XSLT Data view, drag on the “URL Path” fields from the “Current Data Source” tab in the SharePoint Designer Task Pane. (If you don’t see this, then select “Task Panes” from the menu and choose “Data Source Library”. Navigate to the “SharePoint Libraries” and open your Document Library Data Source Properties by selecting “Show Data”)
Step 21: Convert the URL field to a Picture
Right click the URL Path field that you just dragged onto the canvas and select and format it as a picture.
Select “Yes” when prompted to confirm the Data View format change.
Step 22: Resize the picture and column
Using your mouse on the picture and column control points (just move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the image), drag the items to the correct size you want as a thumbnail.
Step 23: Save Your Changes
When you save your changes, you will be asked to “Unghost” this page. This means that the page will now be “Customized” from the SharePoint “Out-Of-The-Box” settings. Any future upgrades, Service Packs, or Hotfixes will NOT be applied to this page because it will now reside in the SharePoint Content Database instead of the File System. In addition, when you “Unghost” a page, it will become “Checked-Out” from Source Control.
Step 24: Check the page back into Source Control
Right mouse click on the page and select “Check-in”
Step 25: View Completed Modification
Selecting “Thumbnails” from the view task pane will show your Picture Library in Datasheet view format.
Author: Paul D. Fox
Paul Fox is currently an experienced SharePoint Solutions Administrator for a company focused on designing, building and servicing commercial nuclear reactors. He is currently involved in building SharePoint solutions for engineers. In his spare time, he works on solving complex SharePoint Solutions for fun! Hope this one helps you out. Happy SharePointing!
but what happens to newly uploaded graphics?
When you upload a graphic, make sure you pick the “Picture” Content Type when you are asked to complete the Meta data. To avoid confusion, you can just remove the “Document” ContentType in the Document Library Settings.
Follow the following steps
1. Create a new picture library
2. Upload some pics
3. Create a new view
4. Select Thumbnail and Name( with menu ) fields only
5. Under styles ..select news-letter.
Agree with Sandeep.
when you upload a picture to a picture library, SharePoint actually stores 3 versions:
- the picture you uploaded
- a lightweight Web version, in a folder called “_w”
- a thumbnail, in a folder called “_t”
For example if I upload PictureLibrary/CutePic.jpg, then:
- the Web copy will be PictureLibrary/_w/CutePic_jpg.jpg
- SharePoint will store the thumbnail as PictureLibrary/_t/CutePic_jpg.jpg
Loading pictures usually has a significant performance impact, so as much as possible use the Web version or the thumbnail.
(taken from my blog. The original text is here:
http://pathtosharepoint.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/display-a-random-picture-on-your-home-page/)
I think my article title should have read “How to create thumbnails in Datasheet view”. Yes you can create thumbnails in a picture library, but what if you want to see them in Datasheet view to edit the meta data? not so easy is it? I used a Document Library instead, thus the point of the article.
I still don’t get it. Your last screenshot doesn’t look like what we call a datasheet view in SharePoint…and it looks very much like what you would get by following Sandeep’s instructions.
Paul ,
Are you talking about having a drop down menu.
Christophe and Sandeep,
As I have stated in other articles and comments, one of the benefits of participating in a site like this is to see various solutions for the same problem.
Yes, what you are saying is correct. But on the flip side, what Paul has done is shown another way, which might get people thinking about alternatives or ideas for different projects.
Paul and I don’t mind the feedback. He volunteered to write this article, not as a professional SharePoint author, but as a community member who wanted to contribute to the site with an idea he thought might be valuable to other people.
I hope you will keep this in mind as you continue this discussion.
Mark
Question. First, this helped me alot – thank you. I would like to group the pictures by category, however when I select “collapse group by default” and then view the page, everything is expanded. Is this because the way the view was setup? Can you tell me what I may have done wrong?
Thanks,
Kristen
Hi Kristen,
Sorry to take so long to get back to you, it’s been a hectic week. So, this is interesting…
After creating a new column called “Category” I edited the Thumbnail view and added “Sort & Group” in the “Common View Tasks” within SharePoint Designer.
I selected Group By and checked “Collapse group by default”. Low and Behold it didn’t collapse, even though the control point icon says its collapsed. Is this a bug in the Data Form Web Part? Don’t yet know. I’ll have to work with this some more.
Paul
Kristen,
Ok, here is the work-around I found. Essentially, prior to converting the List View into a Dataform Web Part (XSLT Data view), you need to specify the group by. Here is what I did.
1. Check out and Open the thumbnail.aspx page in SharePoint Designer.
2. Right click on the web part and select “Revert to SharePoint List View”.
3. Select the “List View Option” contextual selector (top right corner of Web Part) and choose “Sort and Group”. Select your field (e.g. Your “Category” column that you created for the list). and check “Show Group Header” and “Collapse by default”
4. Next, right click on the Web part and “Convert back to XSLT Dataview”.
5. Follow the remainder of the article to add the URL Path, format as Picture and resize it.
Happy SharePointing!
Paul
Hi, I’ve tried it and seems to work fine, except the thumbnails.
If you are using a document library to store your pictures, there aren’t any folder named “_W” or “_T” containing the thumbnails.
I’m sure to have uploaded a “picture content type”.
Do you have any suggestion?
Thanks, AM
Auri, previews and thumbnails can only be found in picture libraries. This is one of the benefits of using a picture library rather than a standard document library.
Thanks Chris but the limitation of the picture library is the missing of the datasheet view (very useful to rename your pictures in a faster way)
AM
Right, you can’t have both.
With the method described in the post you just load the full size images. If you have 20 pictures of 500 kb, then it’s a 10 MB load to get your page.
I want to use a thumbnail pix in a contact list. I have stored the pix in a picture library and added a column with picture type to the list. I copy and past the URL from the pix in the picture library into the column, but it is not working. This seems so simple, but what am I doing wrong?
ok….everything worked well
but when i tried to change my list webpart view in my web part page, it wont show.
“Cannot save the property settings for this Web Part. Cannot complete this action. Please try again.”
why?
ok….finally got it…..
i need to edit my web part page not my list view
thx paul…this article helped me alot
Hi Dan,
Can you shed some light here?…
I am getting the same message as you did, “Cannot save the property settings for this Web Part. Cannot complete this action. Please try again.”
Can you show me the steps of what need to edit in web part page?
Many thanks!
Keat
Hi, nice article! But like what Christophe says – if your have very heavy images and if this should be done for an public web specially, it would be also doable with a DVWP and concat this, from a ImageLibray instead of a document library, like
So, i would like to know…Can I get the picture display as thumnail by using the report builder2.0.??Meaning that By using the report builder 2.0, i Can get these picture with some query coding…..Can I make it???
Can we create Barcode image view in Library?
Paul,
Thanks for the article! Do you know of a way to do this as a personal view?
I am attempting to restrict access to the thumbnail view and the only way I have found to do so is to create a personal view, use a web part page, then restrict access to the web part page.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Can we create thumbnail view with Edit option?
It is showing error while converting to XSLT.
Please suggest some solution.
Love this! Now can you do an article on how to add the original (larger) image to the Edit and Display forms? That would be so awesome! Thanks!!
Hi,
Thank you friend. This is what i am expecting from long time. Actually i need this as one webpart. if is it possible, please can you send it.
Thanking you
Regards
Maruthi.
I keep getting an error message. I have tried this over and over. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong? I followed the steps exactly.
Error: system.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Brandysoft.SharePoint.BatchAction.UploadMenuaAddPoint.Internal_CreateChildControls()