Referring to #14, according to the security whitepaper (https://cdn.filen.io/whitepaper.pdf), thumbnails are created by downloading an image file in its entirety from the cloud (Filen Drive) to the end device. Then a thumbnail is created and stored locally. Correct?
How about the idea of storing thumbnails in the cloud as well (as metadata to the file)?
Then when I scroll through image files in the future on the website (Filen Drive) or mobile device, I don't have to download the entire image file, but only the previously created thumbnail, which is a much smaller amount of data. The thumbnail file can then still be saved locally as it is today. This would greatly enhance the user experience when browsing image files, as images can be displayed much faster as thumbnails.
Now, I haven't looked at what resolution the thumbnails are generated at. But let's assume that I have 100 photos in the cloud in Filen Drive. Each photo has 5 MB. So now when I open the folder in the browser, 500 MB have to be downloaded just to create the thumbnails.
In Issue #14 it was described that thumbnails are now also created on upload. Let's simplify and say that each thumbnail is 50 KB in size. If these 50 KB per image file were also stored as metadata in Filen Drive in the cloud and only the thumbnails were downloaded for the folder view, only 5 MB would need to be downloaded instead of 500 MB.
Yes, this means that a little more storage would be used in the cloud per image file. But I would prefer this. Maybe you could also set a user-specific setting in Filen whether thumbnails should also be saved in the cloud (Filen Drive) or not. I think, it's better to use a little more drive space in the cloud and store the thumbnails in the cloud as well, instead of having to download very large amounts of data just to generate the thumbnails.
The creation of the thumbnails can be done as possible on upload (which will be the case, see #14) and then stored locally and in the cloud. If a thumbnail does not yet exist for a file in the cloud, this could happen / update during opening the folder like today when I scroll through the files in the browser and mobile client and then be saved / uploaded in the cloud.