[Wikipedia-l] Thumbnails

Thu Jul 1 07:26:25 UTC 2004

After discussion with some people (especially Tannin) on the 
en.wikipedia, I propose a few changes (more like additions) to the 
thumbnail function.

Here's the "main proposal":

    [[image:bla.jpg|thumb|some text]] generates a normal thumbnail
    [[image:bla.jpg|thumb=bla_small.jpg|some text]] uses "bla_small.jpg" 
as the thumbnail

This associates the manually created thumbnail with the larger image in 
a machine-readable fashion. It should only be used if the manual 
thumbnail is of significant better quality than the automatic one, or if 
the manual thumbnail shows an alternate view (e.g., only a part) of the 
larger image.

Additionally, the automatic thumbnail generation should be improved:
* Add a little sharpening, at least to photos (.jpg/.jpeg).
* Apparently, automatically generated thumbnails look nicer when they 
are recaled by an exact even number. For example, for a 640x480 image, a 
thumbnail of 200px is requested, generate one with a width of 213px 
instead, as this is a factor of 33.3%, or 1/3. I propose to use a 
variation of up to 10% from the requested width.

If there is no special reason *not* to do this, implementation can start 
soon. At least the "main proposal" should be easy enough to code.

Magnus