Today’s Question: Is there no way to resize the thumbnails on the filmstrip in Lightroom? I have found the control for resizing thumbnails when I’m using the grid view, but I don’t see any way to change the thumbnail size for the filmstrip.
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can most certainly resize the thumbnails on the filmstrip in Lightroom. To do so, you simply resize the filmstrip panel itself. As you drag the top edge of the filmstrip panel up and down, the thumbnails on the panel will get larger or smaller, respectively.
More Detail: The left, right, and bottom panels in Lightroom can all be resized, enabling you to adjust how much information is displayed on those panels versus how much space is available for the central preview area for your photos.
For example, if you have a lot of long folder names you might want to enlarge the left panel in the Library module, so you can read the entirety of each folder name. And, as noted above, resizing the bottom panel (the filmstrip) will cause the thumbnails to be resized.
Note, by the way, that the Thumbnails slider that appears on the toolbar below the Grid display can be hidden or revealed. So if you don’t see the Thumbnails slider when using the Grid view, you can enable it by choosing Thumbnail Size from the popup at the far right of the toolbar. And if the toolbar at the bottom of the preview area isn’t visible at all, you can toggle the display of the toolbar by pressing the letter “T” on the keyboard.