ImagingTips.com

FastStone Thumbnails

by Wren McMains
(Updated 5/13/2009)

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Here are some other tips about Thumbnails outside of FastStone that you may find useful:


You may have noticed different size thumbnails on some of these pages, for example, compare these next two Browser Views which appeared on other pages:

Screen Shot

Screen Shot

FastStone offers five options for thumbnail size: 60 x 45, 80 x 60, 120 x 90, 160 x 120, 200 x 150. The ones in the bottom screen shot above are 200 x 150, I started using that size when I changed my monitor resolution to 2560 x 1600. I'm guessing Joe uses 120 x 90 as his thumbnail size; that's about as low as I would recommend going unless you have a very low resolution monitor.

To change the size of your thumbnails, go to the Thumbnails Tab under Settings (from the menu, or by pressing F12):

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Screen Shot

Use the pull-down to select one of the sizes. You have to decide what works best for you given your screen size and resolution.

Note: Every time you change the Thumbnail size FastStone has to rebuild it's data base as you re-visit folders. After changing the thumbnail size every time you go to a new folder there will be a slight delay while it builds thumbnails for that folder.

As you can see there are all kinds of ways you can fine-tune the display. Personally I like the defaults, but if you want to experiment I'd start by playing with the Select a Preset Color Scheme pull-down on the bottom right. I think the default is called Bright, but try the others ... they're just starting points, you can then change individual colors by clicking on the colors on the left.

The one setting I do change is the location of the FastStone Image Viewer Thumbnail Database. If you have many drives like I do, you might want to consider moving it to someplace you don't backup (since it can easily be rebuilt if the drive it is located on fails). To select a new folder, click on the ... button and select a new folder:

Screen Shot

You can also clean-up and compact the thumbnails database by using this choice on the Tools menu:

Screen Shot

Which brings up this dialog box:

Screen Shot

As far as I can tell, this just tells you how many folders FastStone has built thumbnails for, it doesn't seem to specify a limit (unless you play with the slider, which I recommend against). There is a choice to optimize the database (which discards thumbnails for images which have been deleted and shrinks the database); and also an option to empty the database entirely.


Here are some other tips about Thumbnails outside of FastStone that you may find useful:

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