ThumbBot is an add-on for the Internet Explorer browser from Microsoft. When installed the ThumbBot... menu item will be added to the browser's Tools menu and the ThumbBot button will be added to the browser's toolbar. If the button is not immediately visible it can be added by right clicking the toolbar and selecting Customize... on the pop up menu. The toolbar button is the little pair of spectacles in a thumbnail frame like the ones returned by a ThumbBot scan

As you surf the web you may come across a site you'd like to scan for pictures without clicking all the links and viewing all the text. When you do simply click the ThumbBot menu item or toolbar button. The Scan Options dialog will appear where you can choose which pages to scan and which pictures to return. Adjust any of the options and click the OK button to start the scan.

ThumbBot will start scanning the page you're viewing and the pages linked to it and the pages linked to those pages and so on to the depth specified in the scan options. When the scan is finished a thumbnail view of the pictures found will be displayed in the main browser window. This results view has a number of buttons to perform operations on the pictures returned including viewing, copying, zooming and sorting. Please see Results for details of working with the scan results.

ThumbBot is not a search engine in the standard sense of a web site where you access a database of information about other sites which have already been indexed. You do not need to go to the ThumbBot web site in order to scan another site for pictures. Actually while browsing other sites in offline mode, you can perform ThumbBot scans . The scanning all takes place in the background on your computer and only on the web sites you specify.

As the scan is being performed the browser's status bar will be updated to indicate which pages are being downloaded and scanned. Meanwhile you are free to view and interact with the current web page. If you click a link or use the browser's Address bar to view a different page or click the browser's Back or Forward buttons the background scan will be cancelled automatically. If you get tired of waiting for the scan to finish simply click the ThumbBot menu item or toolbar button again. Click the Yes button to confirm the cancellation and the results of the scan so far will presented as described above.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Divided scan options and results display options into two separate dialogs