Thumbnail generation + layout

Jacob Farber jacob.farber at utoronto.ca
Tue Dec 8 16:24:58 UTC 2009


Hello everyone,
I've been working on some mobile FSS material to handle the various
thumbnail requirements we're encountering with Decapod and with the mobile
wireframes here:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Mobile+wireframes,+draft+8#Mobilewireframes%2Cdraft8-Mycollections
(should jump to the My Collections section)

I took the approach that the client side cannot expect perfectly cropped
thumbnails to be delivered, rather the CSS should auto-scale the graphic
down to a "best fit" scenario (scale down as necessary, maintaining the
aspect ratio). One downside of this approach is the
possible letter-boxing effect - it can look ugly. Another problem is if the
original graphic is too large image interpolation might leave artifacts and
waste client side resources.

After a brief discussion with James about how to handle this, a different
method was proposed - server-side thumbnail generation.  This would always
deliver a pixel perfect thumbnail (employing scaling + cropping) and would
make the most efficient use of client side resources. However this technique
might seem out of the reach of some institutions, since it would require
technical know-how to customize thumbnails as each implementor sees fit, not
to mention maintenance changes.

Another route we spoke about was a reasonable default catch-all size for
server-side generation of thumbnails (256x256) and then CSS to tweak the
size of the thumbnail to be pixel perfect. This last method would reduce
image interpolation problems and wasted resources to a minimum, eliminate
the CSS letterbox problem, and (hopefully) minimize server-side image
generation modification - leaving the tweaks to the mFSS side of things.

These are just a few ways to tackle the issue of handling unknown graphic
requirements, and I would love to hear other people's input.

Thanks
Jacob

-- 
Jacob Farber
University of Toronto - ATRC
Tel: (416) 946-3002
www.fluidproject.org
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