What is a Thumbnail Post

A thumbnail post, or a thumbnail gallery post, is a website where picture gallery pages are listed.

Why do they exist? The short answer is to make money.

How do the gallery builders make money? Most gallery builders have to pay for pictures and the bandwidth used by their server host. On average they would end up paying around $40 per gallery, and spend 3 hours making it. They make that back by placing advertising on the gallery. A very small percentage of people who look at the gallery will click on the advertising and purchase something. You might not click on advertising, but somebody will, and that is enough to make them money.

How do the thumbnail posts make money? They hold the "power" of traffic. The big thumbnail posts can send a gallery one to two hundred thousand people in a day. More people = more clicks on advertising for the gallery builders. The thumbnail post owners may charge gallery builders to list their galleries, or more commonly, build galleries themselves and list them at the top of their thumbnail posts.

Are they all the same? No, the big and popular thumbnail posts are very clean, but there are 1000's that are not big and resort to tricks to try and make money from the surfer. These tricks include using pop-ups, forced downloads and blind redirections.

How can I tell the difference? Run your mouse over the links on the page. The status bar at the bottom of the browser window shows the url addresses of the links. Right-click on a link and in Internet Explorer at least, the status bar will change to the actual "real" address of the link. If they are different something could be fishy. If all the links point to the same host as the thumbnail post, for example the page you are on is http://the.thumbnail.post.com and all the links look like http://the.thumbnail.post.com/?blah=lKY6SPMEJYZP or http://the.thumbnail.post.com/?blah=http://somewhere/else.htm ... it is possible that every 2nd or 3rd or 4th click will end up in a blind redirection to another site.

Why have you written this? This site sells a software program that speeds up picture gallery surfing. It can be used to crawl thumbnail posts automatically downloading all the pictures and movies to your computer. We hope that you will be interested enough to download the free trial, see how it works, and then want to purchase it. However, if you don't, that is OK ... somebody else will !

Thumbnail Post Downloader

Below is a screen screenshot of Nici after it downloaded the pictures from this gallery