Suggestion: Non-square thumbnails!

[Shaun Dreclin]

I know you guys are "aware" of this issue but I feel like it needs to be pushed harder.

The thumbnails on weasyl are just plain useless. I see pictures of characters' faces, random unrelated bits of art, or a cropped view of the picture that cuts out important parts. FA's thumbnails are just a smaller version of the full image, letting you see the whole thing and deciding if you want to view it. When I'm browsing weasyl I have to open up every single image in my submissions because I can't tell what anything is!

It makes the site pretty much unusable for me, and I'm really wanting to move away from FA

Alternatively if you could provide a way to fetch a small preview image given the submission ID, that'd let me write a userscript to replace the useless thumbnails. Pretty please?

[Noxid]

https://forums.weasyl.com/vbulletin/...ncer-extension this may tide you over until an official solution is available

[Shaun Dreclin]

@Noxid

That looks pretty nice but doesn't quite do what I'm looking for haha, I'd still have to hover over every single submission to see if I want to open them. Thanks though x3

[Gamedog]

I don't understand what that^ has got to do with the shape of thumbnails, but you can create your own rounded/circle thumbnails (I think?) with GIMP like I do with my avatars.

[Noxid]

That looks pretty nice but doesn't quite do what I'm looking for haha, I'd still have to hover over every single submission to see if I want to open them. Thanks though x3

Well, I'm afraid that's the best that can be done by 3rd party at the moment. I don't want to have it automatically replace the regular thumbs with full images because they would have to hit the server for 20-or-so potentially large files every time you load the front page and I consider that an unnecessary strain on both the server and the user's connection

[Selkiegal]

In full agreement with the OP. It's actually the biggest reason I don't use my Weasyl gallery as much as my dA or FA.

I want to see the full image before I click for a larger version, so I know what I'm getting into and whether the piece is even worth looking at in terms of composition/content. Forcing a crop on anything that isn't a perfect square already leads to a LOT of misleading previews. There's no reason for it and it's disruptive enough to keep me from actually settling here.

[Fiz]

The small square thumbnails are a huge complaint and something we're seriously looking into and investigating, but we're not gonna give an ETA on anything. Really sorry about that.

I know we say "no ETA" a lot regarding updates and features, but when a new feature comes out, we cannot and will not put our dev team in a position where they have to rush it to satisfy an artificial deadline. We want to get things right. We also don't want to promise something or promise a deadline, and accidentally end up not being able to fulfill that promise due to hiccups or other priorities.

As for fetching small previews, that's really not possible right now since that'd require generating small versions of all uploads right now. When a submission is posted, only 3 things are generated: Thumbnail, cover image, full submission.

[Shaun Dreclin]

Thanks for the reply @Fiz

Hopefully you can nudge whoever's on the dev team to push this to a higher priority? With tons of people bailing out of FA, making this site work well for all those new users (myself included) would be really great.

[Poetigress]

I'm hoping this will get nudged to high priority, too, since I agree that this is one of the main issues that keeps me from browsing/viewing on Weasyl as much as FA.

[timoran]

The small square thumbnails are a huge complaint and something we're seriously looking into and investigating, but we're not gonna give an ETA on anything. Really sorry about that.

This has been an issue since Weasyl first opened up two and a half years ago... surely a fix doesn't take that long?
Or are you only just recently admitting that these thumbnails are unpopular?