Thumbnailing

Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures, used to make it easier to scan and recognize them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. Visual search engines and image-organizing programs normally use them, as can some modern operating systems or desktop environments, such as Windows XP, KDE, and GNOME.

Note that while automatic thumbnailers reduce large pictures to a small size, the result may not be a quality thumbnail.