Requested feature

Larger thumbnails.

Why would it be useful?

Larger thumbnails make it that much easier to determine the contents of the post without having to visit the page, making browsing and tagging easier.

Currently they're clamped to 150x150, but 200x200 would be nice, or perhaps 250x250.

Additionally, to fit more thumbnails on index pages you could reduce the margin between thumbnails as there is quite a bit of empty space between them.

Also, perhaps normalize all thumbs to a height of 200/250 px and allow them to be as wide as necessary, similar to this layout (with a cap on width for insanely wide posts).

This was suggested before (at least the size increase) but I'm making it official by putting it here.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?

Any page with thumbnails.

I'm not necessarily objecting, but wouldn't this have the side-effect of making avatars a bit too large and prominent? Since those are (at least currently) just thumbnails that get placed next to your posts. It would increase the minimal vertical space a post/comment takes up even more.

If this gets added, put it it in user account settings perhaps?

Jugofthat said:
I'm not necessarily objecting, but wouldn't this have the side-effect of making avatars a bit too large and prominent? Since those are (at least currently) just thumbnails that get placed next to your posts. It would increase the minimal vertical space a post/comment takes up even more.

If that does become an issue, it should be pretty easy to implement tiny bit of CSS code to change embeds size.

Monitors and display DPIs are getting larger and larger, so I can imagine raising the thumbnail resolution becoming greater deal in future if it isn't already. Downside being more bandwidth usage, but as I'm looking at some filesizes, that doesn't seem to be an issue. Though do not like the idea of allowing wider thumbnails, current grid based system feels just fine.

If they are at 150x150 now, how about quadrupling it to 300x300?

It's large, but it could make tagging a lot easier.

Lance_Armstrong said:
If they are at 150x150 now, how about quadrupling it to 300x300?

That seems too large.
I'm currently able to view 20 thumbnails at once. Quadrupling the size would cut that down to four (plus two half-thumbnails)...

Even 200x200 would cut it down from twenty to just nine. Which might not be better for tagging, since although they'd be easier to see, it'd require more scrolling to get through a single page.

Genjar said:
Even 200x200 would cut it down from twenty to just nine. Which might not be better for tagging, since although they'd be easier to see, it'd require more scrolling to get through a single page.

...and still most likely would be too small to actually see all everything that is happening in the post.

Has hover to zoom been considered?

I'm thinking in terms of taking Lance's idea of 300x300 thumbnails, but displaying them at 150x150 and blowing up when they are hovered over. Only one thumb would be blown up at a time. Could probably be CSS-animated to look pretty slick.

(in terms of tagging, IMO it would be near ideal to have a similar setup but have the image we currently call 'sample image' shown as 'blown up version of thumbnail' -- perhaps at 50% opacity as an overlay? This idea would be very dependent on getting the layout exactly right to not be annoying, though.)

sounds like this would work best if user could choose their preferred thumbnail size from few options in settings

Mario69 said:
If that does become an issue, it should be pretty easy to implement tiny bit of CSS code to change embeds size.

Perfect, then I have no issues with the idea.