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Custom Thumbnails on Weasyl by Javanshir
My brother brought up a good point which is that what often happens is someone's gallery turns out to be a collection of faces. Browse Weasyl's recent uploads and you will see.
The face tends to be a core point of attention, so that usually happens to be where people focus on a thumbnail. Very understandably normal, but also takes away from the browsing-experience. People click thumbnails for the reason that they want to see the full image in fullsize, not because they want to see the mystery of what is within the rest of the custom thumbnail.
Custom thumbnails turn into some kind of form of bait to click. No matter how artsy a thumbnail's crop is, that's essentially all it is. People are interested in an image's entire composition, not this.
The only time I can see custom thumbnails as "acceptable" is when an image contains content that may not be appropriate for all viewers. Namely: extreme fetishes. Scat, gore, etc... people of the right age group have the right to have the Mature Filter off, but that doesn't mean everyone needs to see thumbnails of full images they did not even want to see as thumbnails in the first place. Extreme-fetishists tend to be aware of this and kindly post thumbnails that block the image and instead display a warning in the form of text, but as of now, Weasyl forces custom thumbnails on everyone, no matter what the image is.
Think of it like this: Imagine walking into an art gallery and what happens is the receptionist produces cropped thumbnails of artwork and you have to choose which ones you want to see in full...
Ideally, you are roaming the art gallery, seeing art at a distance (full-thumbnails) and decide to step closer (clicking to see it in fullsize) to intake the art. The art sparked interest based on a distant view; that is how we have been viewing art for centuries, not with these custom thumbnails.
THOUGHTS?
Journal Information
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- Comments:
- 28
- Favorites:
- 2
- Rating:
- General
Comments
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"Facenails"... I like that.
These are making browing unpleasant, even with your own Follow list! There's a reason why none of the other large art websites require custom thumbnails... we're seeing it now.
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im in agreement with you. The biggest issue I have is that if an image is too big , the image just becomes this very small bad resolution of an image that shows pretty much nothing of the image. I try to at least show what I want people to see that kinda corresponds to the title name. People will slowly learn
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Yes, these thumbnails are not very large, and that is encouraging people to focus on a detailed part (which usually is the face). A site like DeviantArt has "large thumbnails" because it's a convenience to users to have a better preview of what they may or may not want to see in full-size.
These thumbnails are all small and all square.
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Yeah, thumbnails suck. Even when I know what an image looks like and I'm trying to find it, thumbnails make it so much harder to find.
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Even if an image is naturally square in shape, it does not seem people want to make thumbnails of the whole image... it's always about the cropping, and it indeed makes it harder to see what an image will be, whether you know about it already or not.
The cropping is a huge disadvantage to images that are very vertical or horizontal in nature, especially. A lot is going to get cut off even if you do your best to avoid this focus-cropping.
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I really hope they fix this and a few other nagging annoyances on this site, as it's otherwise quite nice.
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I agree. I would love for an option to disable thumbnails in my settings.
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That would be wonderful. I'm no programmer, but I think that would require 2x the amount of thumbnails the server needs to cache, which I imagine is a huge workload to program AND run. :^[
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Damn. I guess I stand guilty on that. I only went back to do it because I saw everyone else do all of these close up preview thumbnails and I couldn't figure out how to use the feature.
Though to be fair, it does tend to prevent people from quickly skimming through a gallery when the preview thumbnail shows them all that they need to see. So they do actually get to take a better view at the image and possibly would encourage feedback - which I'm sure some less popular folks can appreciate. It's probably not a wise thing to do it with every single image (especially for those that have a massive amount of pics in their gallery), so like everything it's best done in moderation.
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Haha, no problem man, it really is understandable that an image crop will focus on a face. If for some reason the media uses the Mona Lisa for any reason, they WILL crop it to show her face. They will not crop her hands or the blank upper-right corner. It's just a natural order, of some sort.
I would love to think that these custom thumbnails prevent people from skimming thumbnails, but that's honestly how the art world works in real life. We see art in the distance and then approach... or not.
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I agree wholeheartedly. I'm unused to having the option to easily thumbnail my art as part of the submission process so I'm playing around with how it works as a presentation. I think the feature itself is really cool though and it might be nice when coupled with something else.
A feature on sofurry is when you hover over a thumbnail a scrollable preview kicks open automatically. I think having the thumbnail as a kind of eyecatch, and then a small resolution full image on a hover would be great. Full size can come with a click!
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Ah a simple double-feature... that would solve this problem, although there would still be plenty of coding involved, I'd think.
I just think there needs to be a way to make this custom thumbnail thing "optional", whether it's an option or the better-idea hovering thing.
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I think the "beta" attached to the logo is deserved at this point. I think though as the community grows we can look forward to seeing a lot in neat new features ^_^. At least I hope so! Something I'm missing from FA is the ability to see who has favorited a piece. I get the little notification and thats nice, but if I ever lose it I can't tell from the image who enjoyed it. Maybe its around here and I just need to poke my nose in a little further ^..^.
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I highly agree, and this has been my complaint with Weasyl since day 1.
While it's a neat concept, unfortunately it's utilized so poorly that I wind up passing over art from artists I would normally gawk and glee at. And I'm just talking about the smutty stuff that I'm aware of! I'm even more positive that there are masterpieces out there on this website that are getting looked over (by myself and by others) simply because of the thumbnail system!
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Great to hear someone got on this before me! I noticed something was different but I couldn't pinpoint what it was until my brother explained his thoughts of the thumbnail system. Then everything became clear.
It's a shame that so much art can be passed-up based on the thumbnails. It's like great books being disregarded because of their covers.
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Or worse: amazing movies otherwise being skimmed over because of poorly made movie trailers.
I never really spoke out about this, but it's definitely something that has made me a bit grump with the site. Honestly, along with the small number of artists posting over here during the closed beta, this was one of the other main reasons why I didn't stick with the website as actively as I did before.
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Fully. Fucking. Agreed.
Hell, guess what my first journal was about here! http://tinyurl.com/no4cf3r
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I found the need to thumbnail everything jarring at first - and you're right about the tendency to focus on the face when thumbnailing an image - and you're also right about how that can create a misleading 'trap' for a viewer to fall into seeing something they might not want to see.
I guess if you have mature content 'on' you generally have to be prepared to catch glimpses of things that don't suit your interests - such as scat or gore.
I suppose a way to get around it is to include a subtext in the title of the piece - such as (nude), (lactation), (scat), (gore), etc. as a follow-on to the actual title; Some of my pieces have clothed and un-clothed versions and I add on (nude) to the title of the latter piece.
I suppose that by now I've seen a lot of things that would otherwise upset and offend me so I'm probably mostly immune to such things now.
I suppose I'm also less generally likely to full-view pieces nowadays though - sometimes - after following an artist for a while - someone might get a 'feel' for their work and tend not to full view pieces which fail to catch the eye - I guess that I'm guilty of this.
Hm. I suppose this journal has made me think differently about how I might thumbnail pieces in the future; Good point to bring up.
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Well, you can establish tag filters on weasyl, if you want to have your cake and eat it too. Turn on NSFW mode, and then filter for all of those keywords you dislike. Assuming artists tag their uploads properly, you should be seeing little of what ticks you off.
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Actually, transformation art gets right up my nose - I'll never get used to seeing that kind of thing - though on my part it's more a feeling of 'embarrassment' than of disgust.
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Not a big deal to me.
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Huh, you're right. I didn't even realize I was doing it to my own stuff till I read this, either.
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Agreed. I tried to make my thumbnails to show as much of the picture as possible. Fortunately the thumbnail issue is on Weasyl's to do list, I hope it's fixed soon. Before that, FA is my primary art browsing site.
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Totally agree, browsing submissions on Weasyl is very annoying. Not only are the thumbnails annoyingly small, you have to mouseover them to even see the title/author.
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There's that problem too. They're trying to have so much consistency and cleanliness that it's stripping away practicality.
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AGREED
Facenails piss me off and are the one thing that really bothers me about Weasyl D: I watch a few people who seem to know how to crop correctly, but the rest are faces :C I want them to add a 'TIP: Try to include as many important details of the image as possible in your thumbnail. Avoid only showing the face unless the image is a bust or headshot in itself' or something under the thumbnail cropper.