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Documentation & User Guides | Fotoware

Setting default thumbnail and preview quality for the site

How to configure the site-wide quality of thumbnails and previews.

From the Tools menu (cogwheel icon) go to Site Configuration Appearance > Renditions.

FotoWeb thumbnail and preview size and quality

Thumbnails and Previews

You can manage the quality of the thumbnails and previews that FotoWeb generates in these sections.

All asset representations smaller than 200 pixels in size are rendered using the Thumbnails settings on this page. Representations above 200 pixels in size 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.

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 has a great impact on the size of the generated images. The recommended default value is 80 which results in images that are of relatively good quality and quite fast to download. If thumbnail quality is very important, 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 also increase the size of the images. This affects system performance, as browsers will need more time to download the images, and it will result in greater network traffic. Also, because of the increased size of each item, there will be space for fewer files in the FotoWeb caches.

What's affected by the quality settings?

Site-wide the thumbnail and preview quality settings affect:

  • Thumbnails and previews in the main and Pro web interfaces
  • Poster images and key frames for video files
  • Previews shown when doing picture conferencing using FotoWeb Screens
  • Previews used for the image Crop module in FotoWeb Desktop

Increasing quality with sharpening

FotoWeb will apply an unsharp mask filter to the images if this option is selected. This can drastically enhance the quality of your thumbnails and previews. Normally, you will use a stronger filter on thumbnails than 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 content of the site’s cache folder.

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

Note: After changing the quality settings the FotoWeb cache must be cleared for the changes to take effect.

Downloads

You can configure the site so that users must accept terms and conditions when requesting a download. 

  1. Select one of the following options: 
  • Never: Never request approval of terms and conditions from users when they download assets.
  • Once: Users must accept terms and conditions only the first time they download assets. If the terms and conditions change, they will be required to accept the new ones.
  • Every time: Users are presented with terms and conditions every time they download assets.
  1. Enter the terms and conditions in the text box. These can be formatted using markdown syntax.
  2. Select Save.