Resolution of bigger Thumbnails

Neonsquare

• March 13, 2015 16:05

If i make thumbnails bigger in the browser, there are not really more Details - particularily on a Retina screen it look pixelated. Is there a setting I missed?

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Jochen H. Schmidt

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  SFA

  • March 13, 2015 16:52

  [quote="Neonsquare" wrote:
  If i make thumbnails bigger in the browser, there are not really more Details - particularily on a Retina screen it look pixelated. Is there a setting I missed?
  
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  Jochen H. Schmidt

  
  
  I thought the whole point about thumbnails was that they are intended to be small files that can be loaded quickly, require little storage or resource to display and are meant to a general idea of the content of the larger file they are associated with. Make the files larger to provide enough pixel to feed the higher resolution screens and the original purpose seems to be compromised.
  
  For larger views it makes more sense to use the viewer. Or maybe the Loupe sometimes, depending on your need.
  
  It's rather ironic that small screens with high pixel density are so compromised for practical use that users have to make everything (including text and fonts) larger for them to be usable. A lower resolution screen would achieve much the same result. Maybe switching screen resolution would be a more useful approach?
  
  
  Grant

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  Neonsquare

  • March 13, 2015 17:28

  Grant,
  
  Thanks for your reply - you are right that he no. 1 point of a thumbnail is "being small". I remember fetching JPEG files using an analog modem over my telephone line on a computer that actually needed time to decompress JPEG. There really did happen something since then!
  
  To use the full resolution on a MacBook Pro Retina 15" screen a thumbnail in a 5 column browser would need to have the whopping amount of something like 500 pixels. They currently come at 320px which seems to be ok on lowres screens. Let's give them some slack and pump those tiny ones up at disgusting 640px (!). This would fit nicely into this Retina being somewhere like 2 times the resolution. This could quadruple the size demands of the thumbnails! Do we even have enough space to store that amount of data? This could actually mean something like 50KB per thumbnail! We could save a bit by decreasing the JPEG quality of them a little bit - this tends to work quite well without sacrificing the added resolution. But even if we do not change this, it could mean that a 10000 file catalogue doesn't have 100MB of thumbnail data but 400MB. But on the other side: let's face it - the previews already are 100x the size of the current thumbnails - they may get even bigger for 4K/5K does it really count if thumbnails are quadrupled?
  
  To the question on why I would want that: yes I could always open the viewer and wait for the grossly bigger preview files to load. I could use the loupe - which also tries to load the preview file. Having thumbnails that fit in resolution to the used screen would make me see more without the need to access those expensive previews.
  
  I even would suggest using a staged approach: do store small thumbnails with 320px and bigger ones with 1024px (which even would allow a 2 column browser with full screen resolution on a 15" MBPR or 4-5 column browser on a 5K display). To get a browser listing fast you can first fill up using the 320px ones and then if they scrolling view gets idle you replace the currently visible ones with a 1024px one progressively. This works very well in at least Aperture. I hope you don't mind me repeating that piece of software again - there is a lot of stuff I like more in C1 but it's not the thumbnails.
  
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  Jochen H. Schmidt

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