Pushing Boundaries

[Lagos]

Awesomeness. Glad to see Thumbnails will now show the full image.

For the most part: We limit the thumbnails to be twice as wide as they are tall or twice as tall as they are wide. This will accommodate most visual submissions just fine. Very wide images (like panoramas) will be cropped equally from both sides towards the center, so the middle is shown. Very tall images, like vertical comics, are cropped from the bottom up only, so that the top is shown (which is probably what people want since these images are usually read top down).

EDIT: PlayPossum, does that answer your question?

[PlayPossum]

Absolutely, Lagos. Thanks.

[Bornes]

Everything looks awesome so far but I just want to put here for posterity that I would also really like an organized grid as the others already suggested.

[skrimp]

I have been reading the forums a lot since I signed up and I'm aware of the populous that wants full previews, but since I haven't been around long enough to form an opinion about squared thumbnails, I'll just cheer on the Weasyl Team in their ability to give the people what they want, which is no doubt hard work - Go Weasyl Team!

[Hendikins]

[Firehazard]

This is certainly a more progressive initiative than what I was expecting; it looks more or less like what DeviantArt has been planning to implement, with the minimal spaces in between and such. I approve, mostly. But I have a couple suggestions:

One, I'd like a user option to disable any custom thumbnails that are left when this goes into effect. Knowing this site's userbase, there are going to be a lot of them, and it kind of defeats the purpose of switching to this system (though being able to generate custom thumbs that are non-square will probably at least help them look less crap). Frankly, people who choose to use custom thumbnails for visual art when it's purely optional are probably the people I'd trust the least to use them properly and tastefully — not unlike people who used to install custom themes on MySpace. I remember back when FurAffinity upscaled their thumbnails, dropping the custom thumbs that were already there in the process, and thinking "I sure ain't complainin'." Too often I would see artists use them as a way to shamelessly inflate hits by making people have to click just to see what the picture actually is; ironically, in practice it tends to have the opposite effect because all you see is a sea of zoomed-in faces. The other excuse, that certain types of content should be labeled lest people be forced to see non-vanilla porn — or even a certain type of vanilla porn — without choosing to click, is negated by our mandatory tagging rule and user filters.

Two, what's going to happen for things like comic strips that are way wider than they are long or vice versa? DeviantArt clamps their thumbnails to be a maximum of something like 3:1/1:3 and zooms in on the center; with our built in thumbnail-cropping tool, it would be easy to require people who upload such images to tweak the "normal" thumbnail in case they want to focus on a particular set of panels (maybe customize it so that they can only shrink or expand the zoom on the shorter dimension — e.g. they could crop to a single panel but not zoom in on it).

[Antosaurous]

Does keeping custom thumbnails only pertain to those that have been physically uploaded?

[Lagos]

Some replies to you, Firehazard:

On the subject of disabling custom thumbnails, we won't have this as an option at launch, but we've designed the backend schema in such a way that we'll be able to implement it in the future. It was one of the design goals. No timeline on this, however. Where do you think it would make sense to enable/disable this? User settings?

The only really tricky thing about 'disable custom thumbnails' is the design decision around non-visual submissions: For a visual submission the notion of a generated thumbnail is straightforward: It's just a thumbnail built out of the submission itself. But what's the 'default thumbnail' for a multimedia embedded YouTube video with a cover and a thumbnail? Is it the thumbnail itself? Is it a generated thumbnail from the cover image? Is it the preview image YouTube provides? What makes sense as an answer for this is going to vary from person to person and submission to submission. My personal intuition right now is that 'no custom thumbnails' should be an option that only applies to visual submissions.

On the notion of using custom thumbnails tastefully, I understand your concerns. Right now I'm not sure what this is going to do to view counts, so it's just speculation to see what emergent behaviors arise; I'm not familiar with what happened when FA dropped their custom thumbs. At the same time, it's ultimately up to the artist to decide what their thumbnails should be (within the code of conduct and ratings guidelines) and some of them have put in a lot of time: In particular, a lot of artists have put in a lot of time crafting custom thumbnails that label triggering content. This was one of the primary motivations around providing an 'opt-out tool' at launch to let people restore their old thumbnails.

For what we do about very wide tall or wide submissions, read my post above. What I'll add here is that we've modified the image select tool on the weasyl site to enforce an aspect ratio between 2:1 and 1:2 so it should be easy to create a thumbnail that fits into the dimensions without surprises.

[Gamedog]

Looks rad, I like it.
My question is: will these images take longer to load than usual while on mobile?

[Lagos]

Does keeping custom thumbnails only pertain to those that have been physically uploaded?

No: Any non-default thumbnail which was previously in use should be available for restoration.