thumbnail surprise

A post which intentionally uses technical tricks to present a full sized image that is deceptively different from its thumbnail.

This tag covers the following types of surprises:

  • Animations that build up to a startling climax.
  • Animation frame tricks that flip away from the first frame as soon as the full image finishes loading or after a long delay. Danbooru doesn't always use the first frame as the thumbnail, so these tricks may not work.
  • Images with optical illusions that exploit digital image resizes and handling of transparent backgrounds.
  • Images with cleverly placed halftone effects that are designed to be completely obfuscated when the image is scaled to thumbnail sizes.

Some tricks exploit a peculiarity of a specific platform, and will only work in certain browsers or on certain websites. In particular, thumbnail surprises from Twitter frequently depend in some way on Twitter's image handling and won't show up correctly on Danbooru.

This tag is for intentional, technical exploits only. For non-technical exploits or artistic accidents, please use the Misleading Thumbnails pool.

See also