When viewing the gallery, do you sometimes find the thumbnail even more fascinating than the actual picture - great as the picture may be? Has anyone else had this experience? Is less sometimes more? so that maybe the way we (subconsciously?) decide to crop an image to create the thumbnail actually works to make the picture an even stronger piece of art? What do you think?

a well thought out thumbnail is definately a piece of art in itself. A thumbnail should draw the viewer in and makes the viewer want to click on it. It should represent just enough of the whole picture without giving away all of its content. It should keep a little bit of mystery and fuel the viewer's curiousity. JV

hey I found the forums, only been here 2 months and its taken me this long to find it....haha Yeah I've noticed that on a couple of my ones, its a bit of a let down :o( maybe it's the not knowing what we cannot see thats intriging answer there is to do a massive image, and crop it right down then use that as the art work, but it would take a week and a half to render, mmm?????

Yes Frequently the thumbnail has some wonderful texture in it . . . then you open the picture and it is a very small part of the whole - and not very clear. the textures are fascinating. . . often the whole is not (routine).

I find the opposite is true, I hate it when the artist uses a reduced copy of the image. You see the thumb as say " man this has got to be good" then it's the same picture.

I think people try too hard to squeeze too much into an image. Cropped looks better at times but people can't bare to crop out their work I think.

I don't think it's that people can't bear to crop out their work. It's that there's a school of thought that says the thumbnail should be a mini version of the entire image, or it's deceptive. There are many people who refuse to click on an image with a cropped thumbnail, or pass on artists who use them.

I try to use the whole image when possible. Not everyone has broadband, and given the problems Rosity's servers are always having, I want to give people an honest preview of the image before they click. But sometimes, the image just doesn't thumbnail well, and I'll crop it.

Some good thoughts here. Thanks to everyone who replied. Just to keep this on topic. What I am curious about mostly is if by editing our art work, such as we do when we create the thumbnail, we are actually making it better. I some times find myself not wanting to trim my full render down, when maybe I should, if it would make it better. As for the rage about thumbnails, this one has been ongoing as to whether it should be preview of the full image or a bit of a tease. I think that is going to boil down to individual likes. What settletim said rings true for me as well. Often I see a thumbnail and it looks really interesting. Then when I click on it and see the whole picture I find myself thinking, hmm, if only they had cropped it so that it was more like the thumb, it would have been so much better. It has to do with focus of attention I think. With the thumbnail we are narrowing the focus to something specific. But often the full image has so much to draw the eye in so many different directions that I think it perhaps makes for poorer composition. Just my opinion.