What Is A Thumbnail?

Date First Published: 26th February 2024

Topic: Computer Systems

Subtopic: Computer Software

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 4/10

CONTENTS

Uses Of Thumbnails
Thumbnail Size

Learn about what a thumbnail is in this article.

A thumbnail is a small representation of a larger image. They are often used to provide snapshots of several images in a single space so that they are easier and faster to look at.

Thumbnails usually serve as a link to the larger image. For example, clicking on a thumbnail image in a photo browser will often display the full size version. The image format for a thumbnail image can either be JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WEBP, but JPEG is most commonly used because it is smaller in size than other image formats.

Uses Of Thumbnails

Thumbnails are often used for the following purposes:

Search engines - When searching for images on a search engine, it will return thumbnail versions of images so that users can quickly look through images.
Videos - A thumbnail is a single frame or short sequence of frames from the video.
Image webpages - Webpages with a large number of images often provide thumbnail images instead of larger images to reduce the page loading time and avoid the need to unnecessarily download large files.
File managers - When browsing through images in file managers, such as File Explorer, thumbnails are used so that images can be quickly viewed without needing to open each file separately.

Thumbnail Size

The size of thumbnails varies, depending on the purpose. For example, thumbnail images in document management software are very small because the focus is only on seeing which image is which. Thumbnails shown instead of full-size images need to be large enough for users to see them, but not so large that they take up all the space on the page and reduce the page loading time.

Thumbnails provide users the ability to control the sizing of the image, often allowing them to decide which image needs to be seen in full or original size. For example, File Explorer allows users to customise the size of thumbnail images and expand them for more detail without viewing the full-size image.