Currently, the if the search results page isn't able to get a thumbnail from the API /thumbs endpoint for an image, it falls back to using the full resolution image.

In situations where an entire source is unavailable due to an outage, or other problems where thumbnails are unavailable and the full-size images are quite large, this can mean a lot of large images downloading for the user at once and is a very poor user experience.

What are the situations where we would want an image with a failing thumbnail to be included in search results? Typically, a failing thumbnail suggests an issue with the source. It can also simple mean that source images are too large and our thumbnail service isn't able to process them without timing out.

Not sure what the best solution is here, some alternatives I see are:

• Remove a result from the search results if the thumbnail fails. The frontend could automatically retry when the 'load more' button is pressed.
• Show a 'thumbnail unavailable' or other placeholder thumbnail. Seems like a very bad experience.