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Bless and curse of letting artists crop their own thumbnails by TaniDaReal
The bless and curse of letting artists crop their own thumbnails / image previews in a gallery.
Good:
It can be nice for choosing an appealing part of your art (and crop off empty areas for example), to make (small) parts of your art easier visible in the little thumbnails, or to hide adult parts of a picture.
Bad:
A lot of artists obviously don’t think much about cropping their thumbnails. Often they always pick a head shot - no matter if it’s a badge, an icon, a comic, or a complex picture. Often you have no idea why you should click another head shot thumbnail - and miss a nice complex picture behind it. Sometimes thumbnails are picked that badly, that you have no idea what it is at all.
Please, when you create those thumbnails (like some galleries offer you) - do it reasonably. Choose a preview that actually shows the viewer what’s on the picture. Otherwise there won’t be much motivation for a viewer to click on it. You know what’s behind, others don’t. I know it’s hard sometimes, especially when your picture is a different format (e.g. much wider than high) than the square icon, but it will make browsing galleries a lot nicer. :)
Also posting journals on my Tumblr accounts:
http://schnolf.tumblr.com/ (ramblings)
http://tanidareal.tumblr.com/ (art related)
Bless and curse of letting artists crop their own thumbnails
Journal Information
- Views:
- 989
- Comments:
- 18
- Favorites:
- 16
- Rating:
- General
Comments
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I was looking through the forum here, the staff seems to be aware of the problem and are working on a new thumbnail system, like the ones on FA, dA etc,
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Yeah. That's one of the drawbacks here on weasly. At least on FA and DA, you can actually see the actual artwork, picture, and comic.
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thank you XD this has been my biggest complaint about weasyl and the main reason why i dont take the time to browse submissions, because i dont have the time to click each image to see what it is when i could see a preview of the whole thing like FA. im glad you agree with me as far as the thumbnail system goes here
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I think a small preview (thumbnail) of the full image as a mouseover event (maybe with a small timelag) would be a nice thing to have.
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Don't worry, the staff are well aware that the current submission thumbnails are a big issue, and have already assured everyone that it will be fixed in the next update :3 And considering how often they've updated this site since creation, I wouldn't be surprised if the next update came in the new couple of weeks~ (Don't quote me, though, for all I know they're waiting for one massive update that drives the site out of Beta >w>)
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I guess this journal would help where to look at when cropping images https://www.weasyl.com/submission/353702/weasyl-cropping-tutorial
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Yup! There's been a handful of times where the thumbnail didn't look appealing at all and I skipped it but later on I checked it out anyway and it was really good!
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Aw, they're already working on changing it? And here I was all set to make a comic making fun of it. :^D
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Yay, I can now fave journals!! XD
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My thoughts exactly. I don't blame Weasly entirely for the functionality of thumbnails, but it can be punishing when users use it ineffectively.
What would be nice if they added a little eyeball on the corner of the thumbnail that shows a small preview pic of the whole image when you click it.
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Truth. I ran into this problem earlier today- I just finished my first fursuit tail and it simply doesn't fit into a square nicely because it's so long. What would you recommend in that case?
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Yeah, this has been a peeve of mine. Having a built-in thumbnail cropping tool is a welcome convenience and a great idea on paper, but it's had some unfortunate consequences. I'll be glad to see something more conventional.
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Agreed! Just like its sorta hard for others to tell I'm wearing a party hat! XD
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I hope this is addressed, myself. Also, I would discourage mouseover for showing info as it is useless except when browsing on a PC. On my tablet and smartphone, which are the primary ways I browse, I cannot hover the mouse cursor as there is no mouse.
In addition to this, artist/title information would be preferably listed by the thumbnail and would be always visible, so I can glance through the submission list more quickly and easily.
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You can actually choose NOT to crop at all on just about every site, including this one. The system will make a thumbnail of the entire image instead.
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Totally agree with you.
I'm tired about head or elements focus. Not possible to have a preview of the pics... finally the result is we don't click on the pic because the website is sometime long to load page.
Make a thumbnail is a very important thing. For this reason, most of time I make a zoom off thumbnail and focus on main action. Zoom off is the best way.
Zoom in thumbnail can be interesting for rare situation but not for most. :/ -
I prefer it when a site works in such a manner that in a gallery view, you get some sort of visual cue that the thumbnail you see is a cropped image or preview pic and not a full image thumbnail.
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Fuzz
good call Tani! I absolutely get what you're saying here.