Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Alternate thumbnail shapes for galleries?

Would it be possible to do something like this as a gallery option, given we can already choose between thumbnail and full-size? Say, to have all the thumbnails be squares of the same size, or circles, or what have you?

Also, might it be possible to add filters to the thumbnails, to make them all fit a certain colour scheme, like black and white, sepia or so on? I've been wanting to do something like this while still actually using the gallery feature for some time.

I may be wrong, but I think Kim('s server) uses GD Library to create thumbnails. Or probably similar software. If she does, then what you upload is always converted into a thumbnail based on what you upload. It's not possible to alter the thumbnail while uploading or displaying directly.

The only way to actually customize our own thumbnails probably requires the user to make their own thumbnail, with appropriate PNG or GIF transparency, and then upload the thumbnail separate from the actual image. I don't know if this would be a viable option or one most users can exploit effectively, since it requires some knowledge of image editing programs like Photoshop.

(All the above is pending potential corrections from Kim, I may be wrong!)

I'm not sure what you're aiming for with filters though. Do you have an example?

Sanne is basically correct.

Hooke, what you're suggesting sounds visually gorgeous, and I could see how it would be a lovely thing. Unfortunately, it's probably not something we can support right now, and possibly not ever -- It's a lot of image processing which takes up CPU otherwise needed for browsing, chatting, forums, and notifications, and perhaps just as importantly, for each different shape or color people could choose to show their images as, we'd need to generate the options upon the upload of the original and then store them until they were needed. That'd be a whole lot of extra images that we'd have to store. Hosting just the regular image and single thumbnail is what takes up the most space on our servers, and will soon force us into yet another costly upgrade. I'm on the lookout for ways to reduce the burden images put on us, and this would move us in the opposite direction.

In the end, although we support basic image upload, we're really not a gallery specific or image processing site, and it's probably a long time off before we can invest space and time into creating luxuries like these. No matter how awesome they'd be!

All this said, I might actually consider changing the default thumbnail shape to be obtained through resizing and hard-cropping so the thumbnails all end up basically the same size. That would be a major visual boon, and the original image is always there so no visual info is actually lost.