Thumbshots help users to visualize web sites or preview links before clicking.
Thumbshots can be automatically generated by custom software or manually screen captured using popular graphics programs.
Thumbshots are often used to provide visual hints in search engines and web directories where a large number of text links are displayed on a page.
One of the early applications of thumbshots was developed by Jakob Nielsen while working for Sun Microsystems.
The application consisted of capturing and then displaying a small image of a webpage that a user had saved as a bookmark in their web browser.