Thumbnails

If you remember from the District's Specifications for Publishing on the Web, we limit the size of any one graphic file to about 35 kilobytes. However, we understand that sometimes you will have graphics that are necessarily bigger than that. So, in order to allow you to use larger graphics, without surprising readers with long downloads, we use smaller images to link to large graphics. These small images are called "thumbnails," as in a "thumbnail sketch."

The first step is to make a smaller version, or thumbnail, of your image. If you use LView, here's how to resize an image with LView.

Once you have two versions of your graphic, large and small, here's how you can go about linking one to the other. In this example, I have a large graphic, "hippob.jpg", and a thumbnail, "hippob.gif".

<P>Here are some friends I made this summer: <A HREF="hippob.jpg"><IMG SRC="hippob.gif" ALT="[Select for full-size graphic of Hippos]"></A> (JPG format, 29kilobytes)</P>
And here is how it's rendered:

Here are some friends I made this summer: (JPG format, 29kilobytes)

This way, readers are in control of whether they want to download large graphics.

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