Thumbnails

It was mentioned earlier that using thumbnails is one way around the central dilemma of using photos on the web. Instead of placing a normal or large sized photo on your web page, place a smaller thumbnail image, that when clicked on, opens a window showing a much larger version.

This gives you the best of both worlds - the fast web page, and at the same time the option to include much larger, more detailed photos. Those visitors wanting to see the larger photos then have the option to see these without slowing down the entire web site. This is great for product shots where visitors can see nice large high-resolution images of the product you're selling by clicking on the thumbnail.

Using traditional web authoring tools to create thumbnails can be a time-consuming and complex process. You have to create two versions of the photo, and create a separate web page to hold the larger image, and then link the first image to open the second page. If you want this to pop-up a secondary window it gets more complicated still. Finally you have to upload the photo files and HTML to your web server. All this can be avoided using the Smart Photo thumbnail feature.

To create a thumbnail, go to the 'linking & thumbnail' tab and simply select the Thumbnail option. You will immediately see the system previews a small version of your photo and if you click this, it will show a larger version in a pop-up window. This is exactly how it will behave on your website.

How do visitors know they can click on the photo to see a larger one? The best answer of course is to tell them in the text, but with this system you can set the mouse-over pop-up text to give them a suitable prompt. Hold the mouse over the example images to the left to see an example. If the large versions of these examples were included on the page it would probably take a minute or two before the page was loaded.

You can alter the size of both the thumbnail and the large photo. Once you've created a thumbnail you'll notice the Photo properties shown under the preview image include the size details of both the small and large version of the photo.

One important point to realise is that all photo operations apply to both the thumbnail and large version. So, for example, if you alter the crop, rotation or size of one, the other will change as well. The thumbnail really is an exact small copy of the larger photo.

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