The shown tooltips contain a HTML “img” tag. The source URL of this tag points to the ThumbSniper service. The chosen image size and the URL of the current hyperlink are sent as parameters. The ThumbSniper service stores this data in a database a redirects the tooltip img to a dummy image.
Then a thumbnail generator gets the order to generate a thumbnail for the stored URL. After successfully generating the image, the ThumbSniper service gets the image. The process of generating the image should take about 3 to 10 seconds.
When the tooltip is shown again (by another mouse hover) the ThumbSniper service redirects to the correct thumbnail url and – here it is!
The ThumbSniper service is free of cost.
It is written, operated and maintained by myself.
(I’m going to paste this in the FAQ, too.)
Thread Starter
Ovidiu
(@ovidiu)
I know how it works, but I couldn’t find anything about thumbsniper.
I know a lot of other services, i.e. http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/10-free-website-thumbnail-generation-services/ but couldn’t google anything about thumbsniper…
maybe a link would be helpful so people know what they are using?
thanks 🙂
Currently there’s no project website. In the future, it may be http://www.thumbsniper.de/, but now it is just a simple redirect to the plugin page.
At the moment, the service is only used by this WordPress plugin, so there was no need for me to present the service in general. 🙂
Maybe I’m going to find the time in the next weeks.
Thread Starter
Ovidiu
(@ovidiu)
sure, thanks. I was just curios since I experiment with a few of those services already and stopped using them since some were slow, some delivered bad quality thumbs etc…
how about implementing a caching function into your plugin so it doesn’t fetch the thumb every time or does it do that already?
Another reason for me not to publish the service to all is that I’d like to gather information about bandwidth, performance and quality of the service. There’s still a small percentage of addresses that just throw errors while trying to generate thumbnails of them.
The thumbnails are re-generated every 12 hours at the moment to preserve freshness of the thumbnails. The main address (“shoot.php”), which is used in the tooltip is called on every mouseover, but it then does a HTTP redirect (301) to the static image address. This image addresses are client-cachable and all browsers that I tested are caching fine. So these images are requested only once per user/browser.
It would be nice if the “shoot.php” would be cachable, too, but qTip2 doesn’t do what I would need then. 🙁 Of course, I’m thinking about this issue already and I’m not done with it. 🙂
Nevertheless, my servers are quite powerful and can handle those requests fine.
