# To thumbnail, or not to thumbnail?

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/to-thumbnail-or-not-to-thumbnail/231599>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [July 6, 2007, 2:42am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/to-thumbnail-or-not-to-thumbnail/231599 "2007-07-06T02:42:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tazboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@tazboy](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/tazboy)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2007, 2:42am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/to-thumbnail-or-not-to-thumbnail/231599/1 "2007-07-06T02:42:30Z")

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Yes, I’m making a photo gallery like everyone else. I’m making it so people can order pics from the site. There are going to be about 500 photos per album in 5 different categories. The photos can be shrunk down to about 60kb a piece. If I use the actual pictures as thumbnails, just scaled down, the total size of all the pics will be about 30mb. I know this is a lot.

Either way, the people looking at the album will most likely look at nearly all the pics so they will be using up bandwidth either way. Plus, if I use the actual pics as thumbs the user will not have to wait to see actual pic when it’s clicked on because it’s already loaded. A preloader is annoying to me. I do realize a preloader would be wise when loading the thumbs. Just dislike them after you click one for the big picture.

So is using shrunken thumbs a necessity or if the big pic is under a certain size it shouldn’t matter if I use it for a thumb also?

Thanks for any experience input.