Poor thumbnails quality

[Silvio]

I have just installed XNView MP. Everything is OK except, the application is very fast, lots of possible adjustments, except .... the quality of thumbnails. Very poor. Have already read something about this issue in the forum, but it seems my application offers no way to improve the quality. Any suggestion would be appreciated.

[jkm]

I have just installed XNView MP. Everything is OK except, the application is very fast, lots of possible adjustments, except .... the quality of thumbnails. Very poor. Have already read something about this issue in the forum, but it seems my application offers no way to improve the quality. Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Welcome to the forums...

XnViewMP is capable of having excellent quality thumbnails, and in fact has many options to improve the quality. You just don't know how to use them.

If you do a forum search, you'll see posts where some of the settings are discussed, like this one:
viewtopic.php?t=47571


Let me try and help by giving you some tips:

- The app can use embedded thumbnails (which are usually small) or it can cache larger size thumbnails. (Settings:Catalog:Enable Thumbnail Caching)

- You can adjust the size of thumbnails using either a slider on the toolbar, or the View->Thumbnails Size menu. The "custom" size on that menu is set in Tools->Setting->Thumnail:Appearance:Custom thumbnail size.

- If your thumbnail display size is bigger than the stored size (either embedded or cached) then it will be scaled up and will look worse.

- There are many settings that affect quality in Settings:Thumbnail. Turn on "Use Embedded Thumbnail" for speed. Turn on "Create from original" to use higher resolution thumbnails than the embedded version.

- In Settings:Catalog, make sure your cached thumbnail size as as big or bigger than the size you want your thumbnails displayed. For example, if you configure this to store a 400x300 thumbnail, then thumbnails will look sharp if you display them at that size or smaller. But if you display 600x400 thumbnails, they will start to look fuzzy as they are being upscaled.

Experiment with the settings, and see what works best for you.

When you're done changing settings, you can go to Tools->Settings->Catalog and click the Rebuild Thumbnails button to rebuild all the cached thumbnails according to your new settings.

Hopefully this helps...

[Silvio]

At first glance, I hadn’t realized the possibilities offered by the application for adjusting thumbnail quality. After making a few adjustments based on your guidance, and regenerating the thumbnails, I achieved a more than satisfactory result! Thank you for your help.