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Why does the thumbnail feature require a component to be installed on the web server? Why don’t you just force the image to a smaller size by using the size parameters of the IMG tag on the HTML page?
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There are actually several reasons why we do not do that, and they all come down to the end-user experience. If the pages render slowly on the user’s browser, the end-user will not be very interested in using your site. So, in order to make listings with thumbnails and gallery views appear as quickly as possible we have to do several things we must resize and generate the thumbnail file well before it is ever sent to the user's browser. Using the size attributes of the IMG tag would only make the image look smaller. The image is still the same size file as the larger picture and that entire file would have to be transmitted to the user’s browser. In other words, if it is a 50K image file, even though the image appears to be small, it still must send the whole 50K file to the browser, before the browser can display it. In this case the browser must resize the image and make it appear smaller. It is not actually a smaller image in this case! So if there were ten items like that in a listing, the browser would have to download 10 times 50K, or almost half a megabyte, before all of the thumbnails would be displayed! This is just not an efficient way to handle thumbnails.
So, the best way to handle this is to have the server resize the image way before it is even sent to the user’s browser. This way, a typical thumbnail image is only about 2K. So for our example listing of ten items with a thumbnail, we are only talking about 20K worth of images for the browser to download now. That’s quite a savings on bandwidth. So, the imaging component is required to make this possible. Without the imaging component, the server would not know how to generate a small thumbnail file from the user’s larger image file.
Another important thing to realize with thumbnails is that you cannot "turn on" the thumbnail feature and have the auctions that are already uploaded now show thumbnails. The thumbnails are generated by your web server at the moment the end-user uploads the image to your server. So, once the thumbnail feature is turned on, you will see thumbnails on new auctions that get posted with images. It does not add the thumbnails to the auctions that already exist in the database.
Current XCENT scripts that have upload functionality can support the following imaging components for generating thumbnails:
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