• Registered: 2016-10-06
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Blurr thumbnails for panorama photos

I am using the Juicebox pro plugin with Lightroom 6.
When panorama photos with an aspect ration of 3:1 or even 4:1 are in the photo gallery their thumbs get blurred with increasing aspect ratio.
A sample gallery showing this effect you can see here: www.wolfram-foto.de/test_gallery_usa/index.html
The reason is probably that the down-scaled thumbs in the export directory have a fixed width (170 pixel at the default setting of 85 x 85 for the thumbs). With increased panorama width the thumb hight gets less then 85 px and will be up-scaled for display.
Making the thumbs width wider (e.g. 170 x 85) improves the thumbs of panaorama photos, but causes blurr thumbs for portrait format photos. So it does not solve the problem. Are there any workarounds rather then placing manually down-scaled photos in the export directory?

  • Registered: 2012-04-24
  • Posts: 5,906

Re: Blurr thumbnails for panorama photos

I notice that your panoramic thumbnail images have actual dimensions of ~170px x 50px and are being displayed in your gallery at 85px a 85px so they are therefore being dynamically scaled up (and losing quality) when the gallery is displayed to fill the required 85px height.

The Lightroom plugin will currently produce thumbnails which should look fine (and should not need to be scaled up) for images which have a maximum aspect ratio of 2:1.

If the plugin were just to increase the thumbnail dimensions (which are currently based on the thumbWidth and thumbHeight values), then it would produce (perhaps unnecessarily) larger thumbnails for all galleries (irrespective of whether or not panoramic images are used).

Unfortunately, it is not possible for the plugin to iterate over all gallery images before the thumbnails dimensions need to be set in order to determine the largest aspect ratio and calculate optimum values.

I'll investigate to see if there is a better way to have the plugin scale the thumbnail images.

At the moment, the best workaround would probably be to replace the thumbnails with custom ones (perhaps created with JuiceboxBuilder-Pro which resizes and crops the source images to create thumbnail images with the exact thumbWidth and thumbHeight dimensions).

Edit:
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