« Articles / Image Thumbnailing Upgrades

2026.04.21

I decided to expand the use of the site's new method of thumbnailing gallery pages to cover GIF images.
After that, I tested it on PNGs and found that even before the thumbnails had been generated and cached, it was creating them and loading the page faster than with SLIR.
JPEG images are also being done via the new method and, with that, all gallery page thumbnails are being handled by the site itself.

The image loading speeds are much improved. If I'd known how fast it was by comparison, I would have pressed on with it before now.

Because this method creates a pool of thumbnails for each folder, for practically all image types (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP and AVIF), folder preview now works, even when there are only non-JPEG/PNG/GIF images in the folder, which was a limitation before.

Because the site generates the thumbnails at 418 pixels wide and shrinks them down to 209px width, the thumbnails are nice and sharp on displays with >100% display scaling.

I found a bug with the folder preview, where, if the file name included a single quote in the filename, it would break the style element in the HTML that makes it display.
That's now fixed.

One nice thing about the Sphider search feature on the site, as it relates to this, is that it meanders through the site every hour and, if the thumbnails need to be regenerated for whatever reason, it means that the search process will trigger thumbnail regeneration across the site without anyone having to go and visit those pages beforehand.

Now that SLIR is being used much less, I might be able to reclaim some space by clearing out its cache.

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