Why are thumbnail images called thumbnails?

Answer 1

Thumbnail images are called thumbnail images because what you are looking at when you see a thumbnail is an image approximately the size of your thumbnail if you have big hands. The purpose of a thumbnail is to give a user a depiction of an image file without loading the actual whole image. Some images, such as BMP's (bitmaps) can be larger than 1 megabyte. If you have a folder that has 50 images, that's 50 megabytes of data that the computer has to load into memory (RAM), and this can slow down the speed at which your windows appear and dissappear. Imagine that you are drinking coffee, eating 2 donuts, and making a cell phone call while driving. If your eyes go off the road in rush hour, you crash. If you stop talking, the other caller hangs up. If you put one donut down, it stains the car upholstry. If you drop the hot coffee, then you shriek in agony and all of the above also happens by default. Either way, you have a lot of things going on, and you "time chunk" activities by taking a bite of donut, sip of coffee, bite of the other donut, say uh-huh to your friend on the phone, and turn the wheel 3 degrees to correct your vehicle in the center of the lane. Bitmap images are a condensed version of a much larger image, but small enough to fit many into a Window. People are audibly as well as visually oriented. When you can see a small representation of the photo, you will recall what it is of, maybe even taking it, and then think to yourself, "yeah that's the photo I want to send", and then double click the THUMBNAIL instead of navigating to the file by way of DOS, and then going to the program path to execute the image editor. .... (Ugh... done!)

Answer 2

Because Toe nails are grody to the max. OMG!