Thumbnail and preview quality

On these pages, you can manage the quality of the thumbnails and previews that Fotoware generates.

All asset representations smaller than 200 pixels in size are rendered using the Thumbnails settings on this page. Representations larger than 200 pixels are rendered using the Previews settings. This means that if you configure your site to use thumbnails larger than 200 pixels in size, the Previews settings will control how they're rendered.

The file size limit for the preview generator is 200 MB. If the file is larger, a placeholder image is displayed.

Quality: This setting controls the JPEG quality (the compression factor). The valid range is 0 – 100, where 100 is the best (lossless compression). This setting will greatly impact the size of the generated images. The recommended default value is 80, resulting in relatively high-quality images that download quite quickly. If thumbnail quality is paramount, you may want to increase this value.

If you increase this value, you will see quality improvements that can be quite visible on some types of images. However, you will also increase the image size. This will affect system performance, as browsers will need more time to download images, resulting in higher network traffic. Also, because of the increased size of each item, there will be space for fewer files in the Fotoware caches.

Increasing quality with sharpening

If this option is selected, Fotoware will apply an unsharp mask filter to the images. This can drastically enhance the quality of your thumbnails and previews. Typically, you will use a more robust filter on thumbnails than on previews.

If you change the unsharp mask settings, you will only see the effects on images that are not already in the cache. To regenerate all images, restart Microsoft Internet Information Services and clear the site’s cache folder.

Set defaults: Select Set defaults to reset the unsharp mask options to the suggested values.