I think it's about time for me to find out once and for all. :)

Apparently it's to inform us that the thumbnail is not the entire image but only an interesting part of it......

It's a marketing ploy! The curious love it.

agree totally with fuzzyshadows... it is just a marketing ploy, just to get curiosity coming out from the browser.

i always thought it was a copyright thing. I mean you never know, someone might take a 200x200 pixel image, stretch it to 1000x1000, and say it's his =) drac

I do this quite a bit. If there's a bit of fun in the image, it is best not to reveal the gag in the thumb. Many people won't bother to view the large image if you do. Sometimes I just don't want to give away the whole idea in the thumbnail. And since there are many people who would just look at the thumb and think it was all the image had to offer, I add the word "Detail" so they know there's more to it. For some images, the thumbnail just can't do the image justice. Other times, using the whole image as the thumb just seems to be better. It just depends on the image and one's personal taste. John To bring up a related topic, does anyone look at images that have no thumbnails? Maybe I should be ashamed to admit it, but I don't believe I've ever looked at one. I think it makes me a bit leery. I've been burned by thumbnails that inadequately represented the image. Stuff that I really didn't want to see that went places I didn't really want to go, if you know what I mean.

I don't tend to look at thumbnailless pictures, unless there are a few comments already. And thumbnails that have nothing to do with the true image bug me also. Should be a law against it. Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood.

I have never really known the why behind the "DETAIL" on the thumbs either... I like your reasoning about it Tjohn. As for images with no thumbnails.... Like you Phil...I almost never look at them... unless there are a few comments.

I thought it meant the render had been obsessively cleaned..;) or maybe it's just a new version of 'wash me'?..;)

Sorry! No thumb-no view. Or at least it better have a very intriguing title. Full pic thumbs are often clear enough to allow me to decide if I want to view the whole thing or not.. and then I can winno-out the shinny spheres over water etc.

Hey, I look at thumb-less ones sometimes, and I've found quite a few gems, some are even on my favorite images list I believe.

I use the detail method for one of two reasons...either the full image at 200x200 looks like crap from the loss of detail (sometimes the details of an image are more important to me, personally, than the overall subject). Or, I have nudity in the image but want to tone down how much is in the thumbnail because I don't necessarily want to get only nudity-driven views. As mentioned, focusing on a portion of the image without indicating it, might lead the viewer to assume there's nothing more to the image...therefore, I put "detail" on the thumbnail in case they were interested enough in the detail to see the whole version. It's not meant to be a tease on my part. Just trying to give the best representation of the work inside.