What Is a Thumbnail Index and how Is It used in Photography?
A thumbnail index is an index of images comprised of thumbnails; reduced size versions of images designed to give you an ‘at a glance’ idea of an images contents. Thumbnail indexes usually replace text indexes in cameras and image editing software because of the practicality of searching visually when working with photographs. Thumbnail indexes will often contain a small amount of metadata which can be used alongside the thumbnails to quickly identify images in libraries that can sometimes contain hundreds of thousands of individual images. Thumbnail indexes can be ‘zoomed in’ on to allow a photographer to view multiple larger images simultaneously to assist in locating specific pieces of work.