THUMBNAILS!!! swear,.... i can skin a molecule off a gnats ass in photoshop, but for the life of me i can't figure out consistently how to get a thumbnail under 15kb from one of my vue renders!! HELP!!!! no prob getting the render under the limbo stick to post, but the straight jacket is always at the ready at thumbnail time...any suggestions....please, ...the sweet balm of a solution... seriously (and i was being very serious already..) anybody with some help would find purchase in the pantheon of my favorites. more info? ....ask away. please, don't let this be my waterloo!(i do windows..even the glass kind!) thank you, thank you, thank you!! (in advance and on reciept!) steelrazer (the humbled one)

What are you saving the thumbnail as? Jpg, Gif, .....? With jpg and gif files you can set the level of compression. Um, don't know what else to say, so I'll shut up now.

Hi, If you re reducing your large render to a thumbnail then you will not really get a good image. I do a render at the thumbnail size, save as a BMP and then use Paint shop pro to JPG it as it is easier to see what size the image is. Cheers Neil.

Render your scene in Vue at 200x150. Save it as a .jpg. I usually set my compression at around 90% but you may have to play around with it to get the right size. Hope this helps.

I use photoshop to make my thumbnails to the required size. First I load my original image and go to save for web. It will let you see the size of the image in task bar. If it is over the required 512 KB then look over in left and a slider will let you drop the compression down to under 512KB and then save it to upload. Do the same for Thumbnail but first go to image/image size and I make my thumbnails 200 for width and let height be what ever it wants to be since I leave constrain Proportains checked. Now that you got the size you want go to save for web and in the right dropdown where it says quality use the slider to get your image under 15 KB by watching in lower left corner you will see the KB's change. My quality settings are usually between 60 and 85 depending on thumbnail. Then save the thumbnail as jpg and upload. Hope this is not to confusing. :o) Attached is image from save for web window where you make the changes before saving.

Have you tried the freeware program 'Easy Thumbnails'? All my thumbs are made with that, you set the size you want and can adjust the quality as well.

thanks for the different methods. i will try them and let y'all know the results. frankly one thing that i never thought of was the "save for web" option in PS. the method of rendering a small image in vue seems to be viable also. i will report back if my sanity is saved. thanks again.

Just to wrap up this thread: i appreciate all the great suggestions. i used "save for web" in photoshop. it turned out to be the most painless for my purposes and i can fine tune it easily. i truly appreciate your taking the time to help me out here. i feel "72 degrees in my head" again. by the way, the piece that i posted so painlessly, thanks to y'all is "Waking the Ancients" . again, thanks! steelrazer (bill)

I use Corel PhotoPaint for all my thumbnails ... The jpg option offers a great degree of flexibility, and the estimated size display is pretty accurate. Hope this helps.

Is there some actual use for them? Thanks, Carl

You need a thumbnail if you want to post a picture in the galleries here. Well, you don't actually need one, just that pictures without thumbanails don't get as many views as those with them!