How to create a thumbnail for submitting your image.

Requirements for a thumbnail to be posted to Artalyst

The thumbnail can be a smaller resized version of your fullsize image or it can be a small cropped area of the fullsize image. The thumbnail MUST be a portion of the original image and it MUST be exactly 80 pixels wide by 80 pixels high.

The reason for this is viewing on the main gallery pages. All of the thumbnails line up perfectly with one another, not all different shapes and orientations. Just like this:

The advantages to the site are: 1) The gallery page is nice and inviting, not cluttered with different shaped thumbnails. 2) Increases the quality of the content posted to the site. A little more effort and care is taken with your "artwork" to present it in the best possible fashion. This will cut down on the typical "snapshots" that can be uploaded in bulk with little or no quality (and effort) at all.

What are the advantages to me the artist?

You may be wondering what, if any, advantages you have by going through this lengthy process. Well, there are some really good reasons:

When someone sees a thumbnail, they see the whole thing at a glance, not at the original quality and resolution that you intended, but at a severly reduced quality of presentation.
Many browsers, intentionally or not, will prejudge the image and decide if clicking on the link and seeing the full view is worth wasting their precious internet time or not. Some thumbnails don't really give a good impression of the full image either, so browsers selectively pass the image by to something else that looks more interesting. This means less views for your image and less comments, votes and feedback.
By creating your thumbnail, you essentially create advertising space to get people to look at your image. You can crop closely into interesting areas leaving the browser interested in what the fullsize may look like.

Cropping the fullsize image for a thumbnail.

First, you will need some type of image editing software that will let you crop an image. If you don't already have software that was included with your camera or scanner, then you can download shareware image editing software that can do the trick. You don't have to buy an expensive image editing software suite to crop and resize an image.

For this tutorial I will be using adobe photoshop to crop my image. The technical procedure will be different for each software product, so I will focus on concept only. Starting with this painting of an alien girl, I want to create a thumbnail that will be interesting. Simply reducing the size of the image to 80 pixels is not in my best interest here. Although some images are perfectly suited for a simple reduction in size, in my opinion, this one isn’t.

So I select an area to crop that will be an interesting image by itself, and create a curiosity with the browser so that they will click on the thumbnail to see the fullsize image. In adobe photoshop, I hold the shift button down while selecting the crop area so that it remains perfectly square. The size of the crop is not important right now, just the composition.

Once I have my cropped area, in this example it is 110x110 pixels, I resize the image to 80x80 and save it with a new filename such as tn_image.jpg. This distinguishes my thumbnail from my fullsize which is image.jpg. Then I am ready to upload the thumbnail into the thumbnail box, and the fullsize image into the image box on the upload page.