Poll: How do you prefer thumbnails for photo galleries be made?
Thursday December 4, 2008
scaled down image
this is a thumbnail that is the exact same proportions as the original, it's just smaller.
cropped image
this is a thumbnail that is cropped to a standard size or shape, but the picture remains the same size, so only a small portion of it remains.
cropped and resized image
this is a thumbnail that is cropped to a standard shape or size, and then resized to be smaller.
There are advantages to each method. A scale thumbnail shows the full extent of the image, while a cropped one shows details that would otherwise be missed. And the cropped and resized one generates a uniform appearance for the thumbnail page design (For example: the fancy photo gallery free template). How do you prefer your thumbnails?
Comments
It really depends on what I want to accomplish. Right now I am working on a photo album of family pictures that go back to the early 1900’s, I want people to look at them and if they know who they are to leave a comment so I can put the names to the faces. On the other hand if I am creating a catalog, then I would use the thumbnail size picture and make it so it would enlarge upon mouseover or click to enlarge.
The ‘Vote’ button doesn’t seem to work in FF3 or IE7, so maybe the code is wrong/missing?
I much prefer thumbnails that contain the whole image.
Jennifer, I had trouble using your poll. The mouse wouldn’t select either a choice or the vote button. It seems like some overexuberant contortion to prevent selecting - and infringing copyright - text masked off the poll box. I was able to select a few characters of the poll title text, then tab down to a selecting, use the space bar to toggle my choice on the radio buttons, and tab on to the ‘vote’ button and hit return to actually vote.
It sure seemed to be lacking is usability and hospitality.
No, no - it’s the “UL” element in the page that overlaps most of the voting radio buttons, including the submit one. It’s just a technical error, not a design choice.
You can click on the first choice and use the up/down arrows to choose, and the enter key to submit until it’s fixed.
Ugh! I hate that bug. I reported it earlier in the year, and the About.com designers still haven’t fixed it.
It’s especially frustrating as using lists is an important way to write online for clarity and utility. And I forget all the time to not use them.
I’ve removed the list and complained (again) to About staff. Perhaps if you complained as well, they might get this issue (that’s been a problem for months if not years) fixed. Here’s the customer care URL if you care to spend 3 minutes helping: http://webdesign.about.com/gi/pages/pform.htm
Thanks!
Well, I sent them a note…
Otherwise, I always prefer scaled down thumbnails, because for me it’s important to get a good zoomed out/far view, with less load time, of the images list.
I also use a second thumbnail that is big for standard view (but not too big for a web page), with all the image info, that is linked to the full view image file, or with a small/large view (DHTML) option.
You could also let the user choose between view modes - crop/scale/crop+scale.
For a jewelry website I am working on the customer wanted scaled down which worked great but for my wife’s art website we used the cropped + scaled method and it has turned out awesome. I think all three have their places but the most common one I see is the scaled method.
I selected “cropped and resized” as the safest choice to maintain a layout’s integrity.
If the original images are pretty uniform in aspect, simple resiaing them should be fine.
I generally follow whatever the designer shows.
I also let the Drupal image module handle automatic derivitive file conversions.
Recently I did change the default 100×100 thumbnail setting to 200×200 (what it actually does is to scale the largest dimension of the original image to the thumbnail setting size - I think you can set the thumbs to be square, too, if you want.