Thumbnail

All Music Guide:

Discharging energizing themes, strongly relying on a solid rhythm section and striking melodies, Thumbnail raised their way within the alternative rock scene, although for less than six years. It was in late 1995 that Thumbnail first assembled, by that time with a lineup consisting of Justin Sinkovich (guitar, vocals), Jason Morris (guitar, vocals), Steve Schmidt (bass), and David Burns (drums). Signing their first record deal by the end of 1995, Thumbnail reissued Thumbnail, their first self-titled album for the Cargo/Headhunter Records label in the midst of 1996. Red Beat, the band's long-awaited second album, hit record stores in 1996 still on the Headhunter logo. During the following years, the group eventually disbanded, and it was only in 2001 that File 13, the Philadelphia-based record label co-founded by Burns, decided to revitalize Thumbnail's themes by releasing That Static, an album created three years before its official release. Invigorated by a significant reaction to the new album, Thumbnail eventually entered an extensive touring season.

Wikipedia:

Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-organizing programs normally use thumbnails, as do most modern operating systems or desktop environments, such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, KDE(Linux), and GNOME(Linux).

Overview

Some web designers produce thumbnails with HTML coding that makes the user's browser shrink the picture, rather than use a smaller copy of the image. In principle the display size of an image in pixels should always correspond to its actual size, in part because one purpose of a thumbnail image on a web page is to reduce download time. The visual quality of browser resizing is also usually less than ideal.

Displaying a significant part of the picture instead of the full frame can allow using a smaller thumbnail while maintaining recognizability. For example, when thumbnailing a full-body portrait of a person, it may be better to show the face slightly reduced than an indistinct figure. This has the disadvantage that it misleads viewers about what the image contains, so it is less well suited for searching or a catalogue than for artistic presentations.

In 2002, the court in the US case Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation ruled that it was fair use for Internet search engines to use thumbnail images to help web users find what they seek.

Etymology

The word "thumbnail" is a reference to the human thumbnail and alludes towards the small size of the image or picture, comparable to the size of the human thumbnail. While the earliest use of the word in this sense dates back to the 17th century, the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms is reported to have documented that the expression first appears in the mid-19th century to refer to 'a drawing the size of the thumbnail'. The word was then used figuratively, in both noun and adjective form, to refer to anything small or concise, such as a biographical essay. The use of the word "thumbnail" in the specific context of computer images as 'a small graphical representation, as of a larger graphic, a page layout, etc.' appears to have been first used in the 1980s.

Dimensions

The term vignette is sometimes used to describe an image that is smaller than the original, larger than a thumbnail, but no more than 250 pixels in the long dimension.

Thumbnail sketches

Art directors and graphic designers use the term "thumbnail sketch" to describe a small drawing on paper (usually part of a group) used to explore multiple ideas quickly. Thumbnail sketches are similar to doodles, but may include as much detail as a small sketch.