I don't know if you remember my Community Server Galleries Multi-Photo Selector App that started out as a Live Writer Plug-in and ended up as a Winforms app, but I updated it over the weekend.
The main purpose of this release that I'm calling Version 2.0 was to make the app more responsive while the album photo thumbnails were being downloaded by adding multi-threading. The original app would be unresponsive between the time the album was selected from a dropdown list and the album thumbnails were displayed. Putting thumbnail downloading in a background worker process allowed me to display the warm and fuzzy CS spinner.gif in the empty thumbnails window and do something else in the app while the thumbnails were coming down the pipe like enter an image group description. In this version I also added a Help Window to display an HTML help file from dbvt.com. Here's a screenshot of the Help Popup Window, opened while the thumbnail downloading was happening on a background thread, in fact.
I have actually been using this Multi-Photo Selector app quite a bit, particularly on my Running Blog. After using it a month or two there were a few other improvements I wanted to make besides adding multi-threading, which I've included in this release as well. One more function I want to get into a Version 2.5, if there is one, is the ability to view a larger size of a thumbnail in a popup window.
I'll put the .MSI and Source versions of the CS Galleries Multi-Photo Selector in my files area probably by the time you read this. Not tonight, but soon. They're packaged up, but I'm still updating the readmes. The file descriptions will say Version 2.0. Here is the .MSI version and the version containing the full source.
Below is a screenshot of the new version and a description of the various functions. The complete help file I wrote for the Multi-Photo Selector App is located here.
1 - The first step is to select a album from your photo gallery which will display in the main window
2 - The size of the photos specified in the HTML that will be created in the photo group on your blog post
3 - Description of the photos, added to the HTML in a paragraph tag above the photos
4 - Thumbnail image display of the album photos. Use the control key to select multiple photos
5 - The created HTML that will be copied to the Clipboard. The HTML is generated with the "Select" button from the Photo Description text and selected photos.
6 - As noted in the previous item, the "Select" button is used to generate the HTML from the Description text and selected photos.
7 - Copies the HTML from the textbox to the Windows Clipboard to be pasted into Live Writer or some other client blogging editor
8 - Used to clear all selected HTML if desired
9 - Closes the window and ends the application
10 - The Help label in the toolbar status line launches a Help popup window containing the latest information about the CS Multi-Photo Selector application.
11 - Percussionist Bengt Berger's group from Enskede, Sweden. Because the group photo makes me happy.