Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:50 UTC
The current thumbnail system as far as I can tell only works with width e.g. 250px (which is default). This is good for portrait images, but not good for landscapes, particularly panoramas, etc, as it renders them too small. Making them larger makes viewing difficult for smaller resolution screens. What I propose therefore is an option to put in addition to the pixel width, a percentage width option, so 100% would display a panorama photo across the width of the page, 50% across half, for all screen resolutions. e.g. in the form [[image:woof.jpg|thumb|right|50%|dogs bark]] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Duncharris
This isn't feasible; the window width can't be obtained easily and is too variable. If we rendered thumbnails at 50% of *every* visitors's browser, we would DoS our own servers trying to accomodate every browser configuration. It would also destroy the caching system and increase server load simply loading every page extra times to check with the client what its size is. If we tried to stretch the image in the browser, it would look terrible which defeats the purpose of thumbnailing.
I was principally thinking of some of the panoramic photos, which would only appear in a certain percentage of articles; we could use guidelines to keep the thumbnails within a reasonable byte size, or perhaps something in the syntax, e.g. maxwidth=700px or something.
Guidelines don't require software changes, and you can already set the width of a given thumbnail. Closing again.
*** Bug 6605 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 7003 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 10107 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 14785 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
