Today’s Question: How do I increase the size of the thumbnails in the filmstrip in the Lightroom Develop module?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can resize the thumbnails on the Filmstrip panel by resizing that panel. When you drag the top edge of the Filmstrip panel up or down, the thumbnails will resize accordingly.
More Detail: When you use the Grid view in the Library module, there is a “Thumbnails” slider on the toolbar below the image preview area. You can drag that slider to the right to increase the size of thumbnails, or to the left to decrease the size of thumbnails. However, that control only affects the size of the thumbnails within the Grid view display.
With the Filmstrip, there isn’t an actual control for changing the thumbnail size, which might lead you to assume that the thumbnails on the Filmstrip can’t be resized. But you can indeed resize those thumbnails by resizing the Filmstrip panel itself.
To resize the Filmstrip you need to position your mouse over the top edge of the panel. The top edge of the Filmstrip is actually the top edge of the black area above the thumbnail display area, not the top edge of the thumbnails themselves. If you position your mouse pointer at the top of the black bar above the row of thumbnails on the Filmstrip, and directly below the toolbar, the mouse pointer will change to a resizing icon. This pointer looks like a horizontal bar with arrows going up and down from that bar.
Once you have the mouse pointer hovering over the top edge of the Filmstrip, simply click and drag upward to increase the size of the Filmstrip panel (and thus increase the size of the image thumbnails), and drag downward to reduce the size of the panel and thumbnails.