# Site Update (2/27/17) - Thumbnail Improvements



## Dragoneer (Feb 27, 2017)

We've made improvements to the way the site generates thumbnails. Thumbnails will now generate much faster and consume considerably less memory, especially when dealing with animated GIF. Previously, animated GIFs would not properly render a thumbnail. That has been fixed, and thumbnails will now use the first frame of the animation for a thumbnail.






What did it fix? Check the above before/after example. From violent spaghetti to a work of art!​
We're hoping the performance/memory improvements also help resolve rare issues where the site's thumbnail occasional stutters, causing thumbnails not to display. We will be monitoring.

*NOTE: *This does not resolve the long outstanding issue with custom thumbnails. We are still working on that.


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## FoxWolfie (Feb 27, 2017)

I'm assuming that the memory and time savings only applies to the generation of the thumbnails, and not so much to their final file size.  Now the next thing to tackle is the proper preservation of transparency when resizing png files with an alpha channel.  As it is now, they display properly in full size, but can look bad when reduced to the smaller size, or as thumbnails.

If a png image is uploaded with an alpha channel that is totally empty, it should be stripped to losslessly reduce the file size.

When you get around to fixing the custom thumbnails, can you please make it an option in our account preferences. I always want to see thumbnails of the actual art, as it works right now, rather than seeing generic warning thumbs on half the art.  It was so annoying when the custom thumbs used to work, as I'd keep running into galleries where an artist used the same two or three custom thumbs for all of their art. I couldn't know if the resulting image would be color, grayscale, traditional, digital, a comic, a photo, or something I'd already seen.  So please, make it optional, if you get around to fixing them.


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## TheKC (Feb 27, 2017)

I have had sooooo many problems with this. Thank you so much for fixing it!! 

I even had one that just all together did not create to thumbnail for some reason. The update fixed that when I re-uploaded the file. =3


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## Alisenokmouse (Feb 27, 2017)

Finally!!!
Thank you so much for this update! <3


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## Dragoneer (Feb 27, 2017)

Just adding an update: older submissions are now being properly rebuild, so by end of today all gif submissions SHOULD have working thumbnails.


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## zorua (Mar 5, 2017)

Is it just me or did this make new, distorted transparent .png backgrounds when not viewing the image fullsize?


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## Dragoneer (Mar 5, 2017)

zorua said:


> Is it just me or did this make new, distorted transparent .png backgrounds when not viewing the image fullsize?


There is a known issue with PNG image previews, and we're working on getting it fixed.


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## Dragoneer (Mar 6, 2017)

Thumbnails for any affected PNG images should be regenerated by end of today.

*EDIT: *Due to storage and bandwidth transparent images default with a white background (this is due to transparent images requiring slightly more data) . This is intended behavior as FA's thumbnails do not support transparency, and did not support it prior to this update.  This tweak fixes a banding issue that was apparent on certain thumbnails (PNG-24).


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## Bojog (Mar 20, 2017)

Dragoneer said:


> *NOTE: *This does not resolve the long outstanding issue with custom thumbnails. We are still working on that.



Forgive my asking, but what is the issue?  I noticed today that custom thumbnails weren't working for me, so I came to the forums for information.  All I can find is this statement and then a bunch of stuff from 2012.


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## quoting_mungo (Mar 21, 2017)

Bojog said:


> Forgive my asking, but what is the issue?  I noticed today that custom thumbnails weren't working for me, so I came to the forums for information.  All I can find is this statement and then a bunch of stuff from 2012.


Basically, because the custom thumbnail is smaller than the thumbnail size the site is trying to load, it'll pick an autogenerated one instead. So there's an assortment of separate but related backend adjustments that need to be made to make custom thumbnails play nice with the larger thumbnail sizes.


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