why dont people just...

[PeOfEo]

Why dont people just go <a href="bigimage.jpg"><img src="bigimage.jpg" alt="big image man" height="50" width="50"></a> for their thumb nails instead of making a small pic and a large one. Seems to me like this method would save a lot of upload time. Why is it that people dont do that?

[Rick Bull]

The idea of a thumbnail is to take a large (both dimensions and file-size) picture, and show a small image that is quick to download (but low in quality). Then if the user decides they like it they can click for the full size ones. It's OK to do what you say for broadband users, but for 56k users with lots of images it can take ages to download.

[Stefan]

Additionally, guess what happens if you show eg 50 high resolution images on 1 page on a computer that doesn't have LOADS of memory installed.

The page will become slow as Hell

[PeOfEo]

case and point. But do you think it would be an ok stratagy if you have maybe 3 or 4 images. Its the lazy way to do things. I suffer from chronic lazyness

[Rick Bull]

It's up to you I suppose, as long are there aren't too many of them. It's better to create proper thumbnails, but it's your site ;) And I too suffer from chronic lazyness so I know how you feel :p

[Zach Elfers]

Two reasons: The image has poor quality when scaled down, and second of all it takes just as long to load as the big image since it IS the big image.:)

[jpmoriarty]

Personally if i go to a site that has big images just shown at a small size, i get out of there ASAP. You'll find that people will be a lot more lazy when it comes to waiting for files to download than you not being bothered to tinker with them in PSP or photoshop: they'll not be bothered to see what the image is.

I have a few scripts in Adobe image maker that optimise my thumbnails, and i crop every image to 100x100 now using image maker too - you can set the pixel size for the crop before doing it and it does it all in one stage. That way, my thumbnails are all no more than 4k, and they load up in next to no time even on my slow-ass-british less-than-56k-connection. It's awfully good manners to do this - it shows that you're considerate of the people going to your site, and if they're going to take the time to do this, then it's a nice thing to think about / do.

[Xeenslayer]

Scaling down the large image isn't cutting down its size. It's still the same image and the same file size.

Sometimes you have be considerate for net surfers like me who are even slower than 56ks. ;) I use a 32.2k modem. :D

And like Zach says, images which are resized tend to lose quality. Parts of the image become crooked or something like that. It's better to scale the image using an image program.

[telconstar99]

I realize your lazy, but I am to! I had several hundred HUGE images that were in a .bmp format. I needed to make these web ready, so I fired up IrfranView: http://www.irfanview.com/

I then chose to do a batch process. I chose the directory where all these images were located, told it the new size to make it, and told it I wanted it to make them into JPGs. A mouse click or two later, I had exactly what I watned. Easy as pie.

Oh, did I mention IrfranView is free? I'm cheap to.

Of course, then I used some free/customizable HTML Gallery generator, but that is another story.

[Dr.5150]

I too am lazy when it come to thumbnails....

I don't even bother to make them I let my server do it for me..... (no it doesn't use the img height & width it actually makes a smaller resized image for you on the server. This happens dynamically)

All I do is just UL my full size images into the directory I've specified & I'm done.

I posted this in another thread here but it looks like it applies here as well.


Imagex is a on the fly thumbnail script

It will build a page from a folder located on your sever & automattically build thumbnails for you. you don't have to create a seperate thum.jpg file for each & ul it.

If you want to see it in action check out

Pics.RasSoft.com (http://pics.rassoft.com)
Or
LandShark.RasSoft.com (http://LandShark.RasSoft.com)

Source can be found at

www.teca-scripts.com (http://www.teca-scripts.com/free/imagex.php)

no it's not my script but I have modified it a lil bit to suit my porpises :D

[telconstar99]

Personally, I wouldn't use that script. I just don't like how you have to wait for it to load b/c for a few seconds it looks like you have nothing their. Indeed, I clicked to another section b/c I though you had nothing there (I then realized this is a script, so waited a bit). I just don't like the effect.

However, it seems to be a pretty good script, and it seems to work pretty well. It also doesn't seem tough to implement. I would say your script is his solution. I may use it for a customer site or two if it works like I need it to. Thanks for the recommendation (I must have just missed it in the other forum).

[Nikolai Franke]

another tool that does that, maybe in a better quality (i don't know), can be found at http://www.imagemagick.org/