Thumbnails! Smart ways to small images.

This article describes ways of creating reduced image copies (thumbnails) for cell phones, avatars and other needs with all their pros and cons. It also provides links to ImageConverter Plus scripts capable of realizing the described algorithms.

Small images appear virtually everywhere! It all started with icons for operating systems, then forum avatars appeared and today my cell phone displays small funny images my wife shares with me!

How do Thumbnails differ from regular images?

mobile image thumbnail

Thumbnails are used on the Web to illustrate links to goods sold in your Internet shop or present smaller images of your photo gallery contents. The same algorithm is used to create avatars, banners or images for cell phones. Thumbnails are so popular due to their ability to save maximal information on the image regardless of strong image limitations.

To create a good Thumbnail you should choose images with large details or cut impressive image parts from the source image.

For example, you want to create a thumbnail of your vacation photo – or a thumbnail of a machine produced by your company. It’s all about one and the same algorithm!

  • Select the most important part of the image (your face, or device control panel)
  • Cut out the selected part
  • Reduce it to meet the needed size.

Manual image procession is the main drawback of this method. Still, individual approach lets you interest your target audience. However, this algorithm is unsuitable when it comes to batch image procession. Let’s discuss automated thumbnail creation.

Ways of automated thumbnail creation

It is not always possible to simply reduce the image and publish it on the Web. It’s not only thumbnail size that matters. Very often it is important to keep proportions of your thumbnails.

For example, standard images produced by digital photo cameras have 2x3 or 3x4 width/height ratio (depending on camera model), but the guy who coded your gallery script tells you that this ratio should be 100x200 px (1 x 2) and other values won’t work. What should you do?

There are two similar ways: Crop-reduce and Reduce-crop. You can resize an image by cropping it automatically, and then reduce its size to the needed pixel values. Or – reduce the larger side to the needed value and then crop the remainder.

The first way is more reliable, as when you reduce images, information about all image pixels is used while you can improve your thumbnail by removing unwanted pixels first.

Secret path

There is a third «secret» conversion method. Some graphics editors, ImageConverter Plus among them, can hide the difference between source and resulting file proportions. Our converter can fill missing pixels with background color or transparency (when saving to GIF, PNG and some other formats).

image proportion dependence illustration

Extra features of ImageConverter Plus.

  • To make your thumbnails more appealing, apply special effects to them.
  • Use margin autocrop function when processing files automatically.

Here’s the list of additional scripts for ImageConverter Plus available to all its users. Just change their parameters to fit your needs. Learn more about tweaking scripts in our article deacribing scripts and their properties

  • Crop-reduce script
  • Reduce-crop script
  • Reduce+background script
  • Reduce+bordered background script
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