We upgraded from SP13 to SPO at the start of the year. I have a Picture Library app on a modern Communications site where all of my old pictures from SP13 migrated with big, full-res thumbnails in Tiles library views. But all new uploads to this library native to SPO are displaying smaller, compressed, and blurry. I've been searching for answers for more than a month with no luck, and hoping someone who has encountered this previously may be able to help me sort it out.
Screenshot: Tiles view of my Picture Library with example low-res and high-res thumbnails.
The only difference I can spot between the images that work as desired and the ones that don't appears to be a Dimensions property in the info pane for all the old, migrated images - that's missing for the recent uploads. They're all JPG in the 150-250kb file size range, 600x250px. Downloading a copy of an image with the larger thumbnail and re-uploading it to the same library with a new name renders it in the smaller, blurry thumbnail. My working suspicion is that the new SPO library isn't creating/importing this Dimensions property on upload, the library is using that property to inform how it renders the thumbnails, and with it missing it's unable to create those higher-quality thumbnails we want. And I can't find any info on the web detailing how I can get that Dimensions property back for new uploads.
Screenshot: Details Pane for an older (high-res) and a newer (low-res) image with the Dimensions property missing in the newer one.
I've also unsuccessfully tried:
- Uploading these images to a standard Document Library as documents. They render in Tiles views with the smaller thumbnail and no Dimensions property.
- Adding the Picture content type to a standard Document Library and uploading these images as pictures. They render in Tiles views with the smaller thumbnail and no Dimensions property.
- Flipping the library from Modern back to Classic, which delivers the same square, cropped, and zoomed in classic thumbnail we're used to from SP13 (much worse). Restoring to Modern returned the same mix of low-res (recent uploads) and high-res (pre-migration uploads) thumbnails.
Ideally I need a solution that requires no code (e.g., no PowerShell) so I can offer a sustainable, self-service solution for my users. Anything a Site Collection Administrator can do via the GUI is fine.
Thanks for any help/ideas you can offer!
