There have been several complains about the size of the thumbnails. Even though they look great at larger sizes and more detail is contained in the thumb-zoom only a couple of images are shown on the screen at one time. This limit is especially visible for smaller resolutions, including 1024×768 that is a widely used. The thumbnail size has been decreased a little. On 800px wide screens only 2 thumbs will be displayed across the screen. On 1024 there will be 3 and on 1280 and over that a varying number will be displayed across. Fewer images are show on a page at once (12) for a quicker load time. The smaller thumb sizes produce a faster response when hovering the mouse to see a zoom.
After seeing lots of very poor quality images posted on the site, I decided to make the resizing for these look better. This implies removing the deterioration while enlarging and maintaining quality. More distortions are created but these still look good. An example is most appropriate here (click to enlarge):
On the left the enlarged and reshaded version (2x), on the right the same but using smoothed reshade. The original can be found here.
The smoothing removes noise and jagged edges from the original, making it look like a painting. Using a lower smooth value removes just the noise in most cases. This option is available for logged in users only and for image sizes below 600*600 pixels.
Try smoothing an denoising online with the online image resizer.
First example of smooth reshading. The original image is on the left, the enlarged one (4 times bigger) is on the right. Click to view the finer details.
