Did you happen to follow the thread in image-SIG about how to make Photo use the new Antialias filter in PIL 1.1.3?
I think it was my thread that was being referenced (or a similar one). I made the 1-line mod to my copy of Photo, and the images instantly looked very good as thumbnails. Fast, and no external process. Since that success, I've been trying to find a non-crufty way of expressing that a 1-bit original image should result in greyscale thumbnails, without converting a large-dimension original (like a fax or a scan) to more bitplanes first. I don't yet know if the PIL API can convert the intermediate image during the resize operation. I'll ask in that group if there's a way; that 1-bit original -> auto greyscale thumbnail would be a nice feature to have. And +1 on the ExternalFile http://www.zope.org/Members/arielpartners/ExternalFile as an option. The batch-add feature of External file would be a real boon to PhotoFolder. It would be desirable to keep large or critical originals on the filesystem, backed up separately from ZODB. Being able to send the thumbnails to subdirs of the original filesystem folder would be a good option, too.