FAQ

What media types are supported?

Thumbrella supports most media formats. Most commonly around image formats, but this support goes far beyond typical web browser images. Video is also another prominent use case for good thumbnails.

Thumbrella will classify most formats into a kind and extension. From these it also generates a standard mime type for each generated thumbnail.

The server does require external, optional subcommands for rendering some file formats. You can check for availability of all formats on with the thumbrella formats subcommand.

Currently there are over 100 formats supported when all subcommands are available.

What is the difference between Cloud and self-hosted?

The Thumbrella Cloud service has support for all available file formats. It also has a globally distributed cache that improves performance for all users. The Thumbrella server is efficient and lean, making it economic and viable for free use cases. There are also paid subscriptions available for more resources.

A self hosted server has other advantages. It can be run in offline environments with resources that are not publically available.

What caching is supported?

The http protocol has excellent standards for cache control. Thumbrella takes advantage of all of these. Both servers and client libraries can optionally store thumbnail results in persistent caches.

Caching at both levels is the primary way Thumbrella is fast and efficient.

Thumbrella results encode all the caching data into a single “cache string” that passed back and forth between the server and clients.

See more details in the server caching section.