SLAMorris Final Thesis After Corrections.pdf - Cranfield University

thumbnail cache is implemented in five well known operating systems and a
discussion on the forensic significance of thumbnails and the thumbnail cache.
2.4.1 Visual thumbnails and their applications in computing
Thumbnails are generally used to allow a user to browse and make a visual
selection of an object, when a thumbnail is selected it can provide the user with
the full sized version. This section discusses how the operating system, web
and software use visual thumbnails to improve their usability.
Operating systems use thumbnails when displaying directory contents, to assist
the user in identifying and browsing their files. Individual files can be shown as
visual thumbnails; this provides a graphical interpretation of at least part of the
source files content. In earlier systems thumbnails were usually of graphical file
formats. A large variety of software such as Microsoft Office Documents, and
Adobe Portable Document Format now support the creation of thumbnails by
allowing the first page of documents to be seen. Despite the increased support
for the creation of thumbnails the implementation of thumbnail caches is not
consistent across operating systems or software applications; this discussed
further in the next section.
Search engines like Google [Google, 2013] use visual thumbnails to assist
users in locating relevant information, for example when they are searching for
images. Thumbnails allow for a larger number of images to be shown on the
screen, which makes browsing for relevant content easier. Dziadosz [2002]
showed that displaying text and a visual thumbnail assists users in making
decisions about the relevance of web sites to their objective. This may reflect
the increase in information available to the user when they are making their
decision; the user has two different sources of information which may provide a
more detailed overview of the website. The research also established that users
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