The Never-ending thumbnail problem

Around 2.5 years ago I asked for help with the following problem: the thumbs in my search results are not real thumbs, but scaled down versions of my featured images. In other words: browsers need to download the full image, just to show an image which is smaller as a fingernail.

A few days ago I finally figured out how to do it. As it seems that every single site I checked has a similar problem, I give here a detailed explanation how I fixed it: go to ‘configuration’ and stop thinking logical ?? You might think that you don’t need to touch the 3th field (optional – image from custom field) because you are probably ok to generate thumbs from your featured images. However, that seems not to be the way it works;-) I found out that searchiq always uses the featured image but when you select a custom field, searchiq will use the thumb stored in that custom field (if any). In other words: column 3 just shows the location of the thumb you want to use, not the location of the image you want to use to create a thumb. Not sure if this was the intention of the creators of this wonderful plugin, but this is how it works on my site.

So, by selecting _siq_post_thumb_url in the 3th column – which seems to be the field were searchiq stores it’s generated thumbs – your search results will show the small thumbs (a hash name ending on _s – test in webmaster tools). The result is that your search results load much better.

However, now I have new problem: these small thumbs are perfect on desktop browsers, but on mobile devices, searchiq will show a larger thumb image. And the small ‘_s thumbs’ are really too small for this, resulting in a very blurry image on mobile devices. That should not be a problem as searchiq automatically creates a second – larger – thumb (ending with _m) however I see no way how you can display it on mobiles, and still serving the small thumbs on desktop devices.

As a temporally solution, I now serve the larger thumba to all devices (in column 3 of the configuration page, use _siq_post_thumb_url_large as custom field). This looks good on all devices, but basically I am still serving an image which needs to be scaled down by the browser for the majority of my users (but of course scaling down a thumb is already a big improvement compared to scaling down a full sized image).

I’m sure there is a simple way to fix it, I just don’t see it ;-(

Thanks in advance for your support (and the plugin which after – I guess 7 years I use it now – still out beats all you competitors!)

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]