I appreciate your point Andrew, but let's be clear...
This is NOT a homegrown blogger site. It's a commercial site with commercial resources.
We're talking about THUMBNAIL (re)generation here, not SETI calculations.
At 1 second per thumbnail (if it takes you longer than that there is something wrong with the algorithm), any modern PC can (re) convert every graphic on this site into a new higher quality thumbnail at the rate of 86,400 images per DAY.
Instead of doing this all at once, one could insert a line of code to check each thumbnail upon request. If the thumbnail is before X date (the date of new algorithm), regenerate it. This would just happen to update the date immediately and automatically. From that point on that thumbnail would never need to be regenerated.
So this is only done once, for the first NEW request of a thumbnail, and so after a few weeks of (presumably) slightly longer searches, you could even remove this one short routine I suspect.
This would avoid reconverting everything even once, which I still don't see as a huge issue.
It's just a suggestion. Feel free to ignore.
