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Ever since Alexa thumbnails switched over to a paid service, directory owners have been scrambling to seek out alternatives. Alexa thumbnails had offered site visitors the visual input to make quick decisions in skipping over plain sites without clicking on them, or click on the link without reading the description text. These thumbnails also made directories look more visually appealing compared to bare text directory listings without extensive template modifications.

The new pricing structure for Alexa thumbnails is $0.20 per 1000 impressions. These charges can add up pretty quickly if the website has a large amount of page views, which is why directory owners are looking for free alternative solutions other than hosting thumbnails on their own servers or actually paying for the thumbnail service.

• M-software.de thumbshots - generates a thumbnail of the URL on the fly and keeps a cache version on their servers. If the site had never been visited by this service before, the load time will be slow on its first generated image. Then it will continue to load from a saved copy on server. The service is actually simple to implement and so far creates the best looking thumbnail. There is also an advanced version where you can specify a bigger screenshot to display, perfect for the site details page. Recommended as it is the easiest to implement even though the website is not in English. Some thumbnails are showing up blank even though the bigger version is available, the service is not perfect yet.
• Thumbshots.org – A free thumbnail screenshots service for websites. Websites using the service must attribute a link back to thumbshots.org for using their free service. It can be something simple like “Powered by Thumbshots”. Their website has everything except a demo.
• Girafa Thumbnail Service / MSN via Girafa Discussion Thread is also a service that everyone is switching over to (legally?). No one is really certain if MSN is footing the bandwidth bill due to every one jumping onto the bandwagon and displaying thumbnails under the id of MSNSEARCH. This is a good thumbnails alternative if they do not shut it down.
• Liquidloungepeople.com - a DP member offers thumbnail galleries for any directory to hotlink and use his bandwidth. You have to register for a private gallery in order to use this feature. Currently very slow at producing the thumbnails. After the creation of the thumbshots, you are expected to download them and host it on your server. Not a good alternative, nor is it a dynamic solution.
• Artviper Thumbnails – also generates website thumbnails on the fly, but the caveat is that you must link back to their site from every page that displays their thumbnails. Visit their site for more details and a live example of the thumbnails created when you input the URL for them to crawl. One thing I found is if the website is long vertically, it squeezes the images thus distorting it. Not recommended. Thanks to Mano70 for pointing out that several parameters were missing when I was testing the thumbnail service out. &q=85&h=75&w=112&sdx=760&sdy=520 (a string like this needs to be appended to the IMG URL). The resource is recommended as it produces the thumbnails on the fly very fast.
• q = quality
• h = height
• w = width
• sdx = crop width
• sdy = crop height
• WebShotsPro.com - generates thumbnails pretty fast however you need to sign up for an account, otherwise there is a large job queue in front of your submitted URLs. Worth checking out when you have time. Very expensive at $25.00 monthly fee for basic plan if you are getting 100-5000 visitors per day. Update: Service is no longer free. Minimum monthly charge of $5.00 for Simple Plan.

One down side to having thumbnails to all the directory listings is the load time. 10 images at 2k each increase the load time of pages no matter what you do. At times, the directory may also be disrupted when the thumbnails provider experiences technical difficulties. Stay turned for a more fascinating thumbnail alternative as we explore ways in building a PHP auto thumbnail generator for your directory.

It may have been a good thing that Alexa ended their free thumbnails services, otherwise it would have never prompted everyone to seek out the many thumbnail services available. Broken thumbnails across the web created a void that is being filled very fast.