The Thumbnail Challenge

I recently received a mail saying “Crack It” in the subject line sent to me by one of my friends. The mail had an attachment named “Sweetgirl.jpg”. I was required to save that image into my computer and to see its thumbnail from the saved folder.

I was totally amazed to see that the thumbnail image was the same girl with some other person. This was a little new to me. So out of curiosity, I opened the jpg file with notepad. It was just ordinary. Then I found out that it had some encoding labels that said EXIF and JFIF.They made me more curious. Hence, I googled for these two abbreviations and found out more.

I’ll put the essence that relates to the challenge in hand. The JFIF and EXIF are encodings that allow you to add some information to the image concerned like the author name, the camera type etc. So its like adding signature to an Image. But this EXIF, had another data which can be encoded. It’s a thumbnail image specification. Meaning, a thumbnail can be added to the current image that needn’t be the same image but has to he hard coded into it. So I downloaded a tool called exiftool which had commands to do the same. And after several trial and errors, I had the result. I did it with the same image which was sent to me. I added one of my collection pics as the thumbnail and it worked fine.

The original image for u. Image

My version. Image

To Do :

1. Save the image to one of your folders.

2. Go to that folder and select View --> Thumbnails.

Now if you see that image, it will be different as a thumbnail. If you double click on the thumbnail, you will get the original image.

Check the details encoded in your Jpeg images here. Link.

IMP: THIS WORKS ONLY IN WINDOWS XP