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External Image Thumbnail Sizes Guide


Flix

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Posts here were moved from this topic so as to share this lesson with everyone now and in the future. :)


A couple things I would love:

1) Signature displays at bottom of post, not directly below post text. This could help make all the empty space (caused by the height of our avatars/titles) at the bottom not seem so odd and empty.

2) Thumbnails for external images. I always upload to imgur, and the forum resizes big images, but they still end up displaying as large as possible, so a multi-image thread takes a long time to load (it also ends up taking up a lot of space). Is there some way to allow for thumbnail display instead?

 

#1 has been problematic for yeeeeaaaars. It's a tricky one to resolve. I've tried over the years but when you adjust one thing something else falls out of place, lol. I feel the exact same way though. Has bothered me in the past. I had forgotten all about it actually.... THANX Flix for reminding me. rofl
#2 The thumbnailing function on the forum is quite tricky to work with. I worked on it some time ago because we were having issues of it making images too small. I know what you're talking about though. I stopped by one of your topics that has a fair amount of images and my browser was huffing and puffing to get everything loaded, lol. Keep in mind though; the forum can't alter the file size of an image hosted elsewhere. The forum can scrunch it to fit better within a topic but no matter how it resizes images hosted from other sites the page will always load at the same speed. It only makes the image appear smaller.

 

With external images, I suppose I'm actually equally concerned with all the screen space the images take up as much as the load time. I'm on DSL so for me every page with a picture on it is "open it, do something else for a while until it loads". But with the all the space they take up, it really bloats the size of posts and threads, when it could look much neater with thumbnails. Plus, having to scroll down the bottom of a thread to try to read a new reply, when images keep popping in one by one, keeps pushing the bottom of the thread down so I can't ever read the new posts or hit the "reply" button, without just stopping the page from loading.

 

 

Haha, yup. I've been made crazy a number of times by that. To the point that I just throw my hands up and surrender until the page has done it's thing. There's a chance that part of that problem is our forums base code. IPB is going to be doing a lot of cleanup so things may change with this problem when we upgrade. In the meantime. Have you tried Imgur's thumbnail options. This looks really handy for your situation:
http://api.imgur.com/models/image

post-19-0-42752800-1393721348_thumb.gif

 

 

 

Well, the problem there is that the image will only display on Darkmatters as the thumbnail size. Clicking it won't show the user the full size, the thumbnail just pops up again. There's also no functionality on the boards here that directs the user to the imgur page with the image.

 

I've always wondered why you can't even right click on an image to get a context menu (this always happens - image just pops up as if you had left-clicked it), which I have thought was strange behavior. Also, in Firefox at least, even when the full size image pops up, there's no "save image" or "view image" ability.

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Oops. I forgot to mention the other part of Imgur thumbnails. It's been a while since I've used an image hoster but every image hoster I'm familiar with has a link option for forum thumbnails. They're referred to as image BBcode. The source I supplied was only half the answer. Whoops! Here's the other half:


Here you will see that the last link option is Linked BBCode (message boards) and below the link you'll also see Sizes. The links bseide Sizes let you set what size you want the thumbnail image to appear as. This link provided when pressed will take the reader to the full size version of the image.
This is handy info for everyone so I'll break off these posts into a new instructive topic. :)
imgur3.gif

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Oh I see what you mean. Clicking the thumb sends the user straight to the Imgur page. I guess that will work ok. Maybe what I have in my imagination just can't be done. Thanks Schot.

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Ok, that actually worked pretty well once I fine-tuned it! Thanks to you my image-heavy threads now all use small or medium thumbnails to they load much faster and are not so sprawling.

 

I had another thought: is it possible to make the forum width resize dynamically to take advantage of wider monitors? Just as an example this forum has a wide layout that I've always enjoyed. It fills up widescreen displays but doesn't require them (it actually allows to be smooshed down very narrow before it give the horizontal scrollbar).

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Awesome! In fact you may even try using the letter "t" at the end of your image links instead of "s". I think you'll find "t" will give you everything you've dreamed of and more! :lol:

 

imgur.gif

 

[url=http://imgur.com/CUqycU1.jpg][img=http://I.imgur.com/CUqycU1t.jpg][/url]

[url=http://imgur.com/UUbYG5o.jpg][img=http://I.imgur.com/UUbYG5ot.jpg][/url]

[url=http://imgur.com/pMRhG62.jpg][img=http://I.imgur.com/pMRhG62t.jpg][/url]

 

Your Post



CUqycU1t.jpg

UUbYG5ot.jpg

pMRhG62t.jpg

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Oh, that is better. I think Imgur was trying to trick me into thinking I had to upgrade my account to use anything other than square and large thumbnails.

 

One problem with going back again and changing the thumbs again is when I go to edit the post, I can't just change the image text from an "s" to a "t" though. Instead of the text, the image just displays. Like this:

 

gQxft4x.jpg

 

Is there some way to turn that off in the editor so it just displays the text? Otherwise I'd have to go back into imgur get the bbcode again for each one and paste it in (again).

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Yup! Top left button within the collection of editor buttons. Looks like a light switch.

 

Oh and I thought the same thing too initially about those other Imgur thumbnail size options. That Imgur is a sneaky one eh. ^^

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