Created attachment 208631 [details]
thumbnails

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547831 reduced the default Gnome thumbnail size to 48px (it is now at 64px). This is the first thing I change on every new system, because I find the thumbnails to be a really useful navigational tool for media, but that only works for thumbnails of a reasonable size, such as 128px.

Attached is a comparison of a folder view with 64px thumbnails and 128px thumbnails.

The 64px version has the benefit of having lower height and having the same size thumbnails as icons.

However, I argue that 128px version is much more useful - the generic icons are fine at their size - they are perfectly recognisable, but thumbnails by their nature have much smaller details and need a larger size to be useful. 

Zooming the view is not a solution either - if I do that I get the same small resolution icons and thumbnails scaled up and all I get are big blurry pixels.

We have the best thumbnail software in the world - no other software actually manages to get a useful and meaningful thumbnail image from a video. We should be showing these off and not scaling them to fit our compact icons.