square thumbnails

I looked back several pages in this forum, but did not find an explanation for why the thumbnails were changed. I remember that Dave made an annoucement that he was changing our thumbnails to be square... but I don't recall why.

Am I the only one who does not like this change?

I try to crop my photos tightly to save size when I do post photos. I guess I will have to make sure I crop everything in a square format from now on if I want them to show up without being cropped in some odd way as a thumbnail.

I have a dialup connection at home. I depend on the thumbnail view to see if I want to click on the photo to enlarge, or even to view the thread at all. When I see thumbnails like the ones in these two posts.....
Post #3377782
Post #3433804
I can tell you that it does not give me much incentive to click on the thread to look at the photo. Sometimes peoples heads are cut off, or flowers are only partly in the picture etc etc.....

Does this chopping off of the edges of photos bother anyone else?

I showed GREAT displeasure 1 month ago on the Mid South Forum .
Although I don`t post there any more .
I was using Words on my Pics. but always at the top .
They were ALWAYS cut off which made them totally irrelevant .
As you say , The thumbnail Pics are like a Street Sign .
If PPL like what they see , They will come in .
And hopefully add some comments . Kell
Here is an example . Grooooowl.

I'm not a fan of the squares, either. If they have to be cropped to a uniform size, I'd rather see a rectangular aspect ratio.

Thanks Ginger749 and Kimberly....

Well, I guess this answered my question!

The chopped off thumbnails must be ok with everyone -- except a very few people.

It just bugs the heck out of me!

Since we must be the minority - I'd better get used to it. Like my father used to tell me, get over it and get on with it.

There were 2 other ppl who didn`t like it either .
They post on my Canna thread .
I guess we either get over it or move on .
6 months on one web site is a record for me .
Usually it`s 3 months before some one Ticks me off .

I don't like it much either but it's something I can live with.

OK Pep , Why don`t you speak your Mind ?

I just did. lol

I may be confused, but when you open up what you consider to be an annoying square format thumbnail, doesn't it revert to the format that you submitted it in, so no cropping is necessary and all the text is visible? Patti

The blown up pictures always look fine, that's why the thumbnails being square doesn't really bother me, you can't really see the picture that well in the thumbnail anyway, so if the thread is one that interests me I'll always open up the picture.

I have no problem with them being square. I just love the feature in any shape. Patti

I post lots of pictures. Didn't realize the thumbnails changed. Besides I must have a whacky computer. I have a gadget that I put my camera chip in, it puts the pictures in my computer. I then hit the browse button on the bottom of the post I am doing. I don't do anything to the pictures. Example, took this yesterday morning as the sun came up.

P.S. If you don't like the weeds, I live in Minnesota & it's lovely this time of the year!

The thumbnails used to be whatever shape your original photo was. The problem was that from a design perspective, it was unattractive to have a group of thumbnails (especially in PlantFiles, but everywhere else, too) so I programmed the system to make the thumbnails all uniformly square in size. I think it looks much better, but I also don't like that it has to be cropped in order to make it square. There is no alternative, unfortunately, but hey, at least the fullsize image is untouched!

Dave

Dave, do you have "prescribed" dimensions for the original photo which will reduce nicely to a square thumbnail and not crop out any captions or titles? Does the image need to be square to start with, or just as wide/wider than it is tall?

I personally don't have a problem with the square size for the thumbnails since the pictures enlarge to the original dimensions. But then, I have "old eyes" and I nearly always need to enlarge the photos to view the ones that I am interested in.

I'd prefer that people leave their images alone when they upload them, and allow the system to generate the thumbnail the best it can. Later on, when I may improve the thumbnail generation system, we will want those original images to generate new thumbnails.

dave

I am aware that once clicked on, the photos come up with the entire image. I guess if I had a fast connection it would not bother me - I could just click on images and they would pop right open for me to see full size. But, since I still have dial-up out here in the country.... I usually have to wait quite a while to see the photo once I click on it for the full size one to come up. I do not think I open nearly as many photos now as I used to when I could see the entire image in the thumbnail, giving me a good idea of what the photo was going to contain before I opened it.

Many people say - well, you should get a high speed connection. For me, that extra $$$$ a month means a lot just to see a few photos quicker.

Dave, thanks for the explanation on why this was done.

daylily, I can empathize - I'd love to have the $$ to spend on plants! We had to get a high speed connection because my husband sometimes has to access his office from home and there is no cable where we live. What we did was get a wireless connection and share it with neighbors. It's not a simple solution, as DH had to set each one up, but it allows us all to have internet at a fraction of the cost. You might have a neighbor that already has a wireless connection he'd be willing to share, or a community based one. Just a thought, as I'm not sure how isolated you are, but you might want to ask around.