Montage2: identical Master_ & Thumb_ images uploaded

This a question out of curiosity and Gary (@doobox) or Isaiah (@isaiah) might be able to answer it, since I am not sure whether it is a stack or a Stacks feature ;)

I am using the Montage 2 stack with Stacks 4, and noticed when browsing the uploaded files on the server, that every image in the gallery was uploaded twice - as ‘Master_xxxx.jpg’ and as ‘Thumb_xxxx.jpg’.

I would expect that the thumbnails would be smaller and used for the Gallery overview and the master images for the larger single view in the lightbox. Oddly, however, both image files have the same size and resolution (e.g. 1000 x 750). So I wonder why two identical versions are uploaded, and if there is any way to e.g. provide smaller thumbnails and larger masters … I couldn’t find any setting.

The max size of the thumbnail images are set at 1200px. Even the thumbnails can in some layouts need to be this large. It still prevents huge 4k images being used as thumbs. So all images generate thumbs of a max size of 1200px, is images are already smaller, then the thumb will be the same size, as you are seeing there. There is no method for a stack to pick and choose if it should generate a thumb or not, based on the size of the original image. It’s all or nothing.

Thank you for the explanation

Could one manually resize the processed thumbnails to reduce filesize? I publish locally and upload via ftp so I could manipulate the pics myself… btw love Montage2 and am happy that it works (again) with Stacks4
Also Frag is very cool!
Thanks

You could indeed without any issue, after export. But each export will yield the larger thumbs, so you’d need to remember to delete the thumbs from the exported file before uploading again. And do a file merge, as opposed to replace, else the resized thumbs in the directory will be deleted when the entire directory is replaced.

Just note that Montage can and almost always does generate a long thin last thumbnail image, to fill the remaining space in the grid. This is often around 1200px depending on available content width. Regardless of the thumbnail physical size, it will be forced to fit in this space. If the space is larger than the thumbnail, then it will be stretched to fit, and this results in degradation of the image.

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