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I would kill for some real thumbnails around here... by Kree
So probably like many people, FA's extended downtime prompted me to take another look at Weasyl, vaguely wondering if I could get more interested in using it, or at least browse the art a bit...
But nope, it still has these atrocious cropped thumbnails. Any other flaws I might be willing to overlook, but damn are those thumbnails so utterly unhelpful. If it isn't a headshot which throws out any context the thumbnail might have had, it's so excessively cropped in all the wrong ways, removing heads or legs or whatnot, that I can barely comprehend what species is being depicted, let alone what the image is actually supposed to be about.
Cropped thumbnails don't actually give a real overview of what the full image is going to look like. If normal thumbnails were analogous to looking down from up high at a bunch of images, then cropped ones are like trying to squint through a grid of squares at something held a at a jaunty angle a few feet away. It doesn't matter how "nice" they look, they're about as useful as a Ferrari is to a blind man.
I'm sure that perhaps to the artist, the crop doesn't look that bad. But it's only because when they see this mangled crop, their brain can already fill in the rest of the image for them.
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Comments
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It's the only thing I can do, these handicapped thumbnails prevent me from being able to look at any of the actual art on this site. When I try, it feels like I'm spelunking underground in an attempt to uncover gems. It's a really unrewarding experience, and that frustrates me D:
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I guess I'm just too german to NOT like this style. Everything rows up perfectly and neat and my gallery will look totally even *___*
But I guess I get what you mean with the "can't know what the full picture looks like"-critique. I'd prefer if a real preview of the picture would show when you hover it C: That'd be cool.-
That would still leave all the crucial information hidden, just for the sake of fashion over function :(
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I came to experience that the devs on Weasyl really listen to what you have to say and are trying to improve the site the best they can. There even is a Twitter solely for the Weasyl dev team when you wanna get in touch with them.
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I already checked, there's a forum thread about thumbnails that's over a year old. Other than a vague mention of working on a change to the thumbnails, the devs haven't changed anything. It doesn't really fill me with confidence that they actually practice what they advertise themselves to be.
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Anything is better than advertising a site overhaul promised for 2011 and not delivering anything and never mention it since :P
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Yes, but I can at least favorite journals, like this one! :P
To be honest, I like this site overall, except for that. Also that captions and artist only appear at hover, which is annoying when trying to glance through search results for something more specific to what you're searching for, as people suck at tagging with relevant keywords.
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Yeah, I hadn't noticed the lack of authors also. That's annoying too, but at least that's potentially easily fixed, or at least hackable with some JavaScript or something.
But with these thumbnails, there's no way to bring back that information lost by the crop, without re-generating a whole new thumbnail from the original, and it seems the devs care more about letting people crop than actually showing a real kind of thumbnail. It's a really huge roadblock anytime I try to use this site :(
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As a web-developer myself, this is a problem that has no win-win solutions. If they took away any ability to crop your own thumbnail, and leave it completely automatic, what happens then when everyone uploads images that are not a perfect squares? The system will cut off the tops of heads and bottoms of bodies. It happened to me when I didn't upload thumbnails and didn't select a crop area.
To prevent this, you need user intervention to make sure that the bulk of the image is not cropped out. But that leave the system open to abuse by arty types to crop down onto a small part of the image and skew the relevance .. and we're back to where we started.
One solution, which still isn't perfect, is to have a popup with a small uncropped view of the image when you hover over the thumbnail. The costs to the site to do this depends on how well its coded. FA uses something similar with the latest submission/favourited sections.
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At this point, I think the only way I'm going to even be able to tolerate interacting with Weasyl is to code some sort of local/personal screen scraper app to parse and import images into a database and generate my own "real" thumbnails from scratch...
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Same here, but to make saving images easier. Having to click three times to get to the images is a pain in the neck. At least FA has the FireFix add-on helper. (Having to click three times to get anywhere in this site is annoying. Its flow isn't well thought out.)
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I'm not to big on the automatic cropping that the system does either. I guess shrinking the image down from it's largest dimension while keeping the aspect ratio isn't a popular idea? I've decided to start using the superzoom-user controlled crop for the images that are so rectangular that the autocrop chops away to much to make the thumbnail look awful anyway. I try to preserve a fair amount of what's left when I do that, or at least focus on the more interesting bits that would make people decide if they want to click on it, but I think I'm going to pay a little more attention to the cropping in the future now.
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FinnFann
Dun be a peen and start posting here ranting butt >>