MIJC Snapshot

Got a little nerdy rant here that I thought I’d share with the club.

The “MIJC Snapshot” feature in the right column of our website has long been a source of annoyance to me, and probably other members as well.  It seems like more often than not, you click the photo to make it bigger and you still get a small version of the photo.  Lemme ‘splain why.

The Snapshot software pulls the image at random (each time a page is loaded) from the entirety of our online photo collection, which dates back to 2003.  That’s a lot of photos to pick from, but it’s cool because sometimes you get a pretty fun old picture, or a behind-the-scenes video picture, or some moment you had totally forgotten about when your Jeep used to have all-terrains and red seat covers.  The problem is that when I upload photos, the site automagically makes a big version, a medium one, and a thumbnail of each photo.  It unfortunately puts all those versions in the same folder.  So when the Snapshot software goes to look for a random photo from that folder, statistically speaking, it’s more likely to pick a small or medium one.  So when you see a Snapshot you like and you click it to make it bigger, you’re still looking at a tiny version of the picture.

I tried to fix the code to only look for the larger ones, but that didn’t work.  So the other day, pushed one tiny picture too far by Snapshot, I gave up and just uploaded all the larger versions of the photos to a new folder for Snapshot to draw from.  Now when you click the photo to make it bigger, you are guaranteed to get a big version of the picture.  Did that take up a bunch of space on our site?  You bet it did.  Does it matter?  No, it does not.  We’ve got tons of available space.

So enjoy the new and improved MIJC Snapshot, now with big photos only.