"Thumbnail retargeting" was an attempt to take prettier thumbnails, by analyzing the actual image content and selecting the "most interesting" parts (see bug 245455 and bug 155269 ). However, the code was never launched and has long been abandoned, and the original author doesn't think it's worth reviving. Time to get rid of it.
Code location:
/chrome/browser/thumbnails/content_based_thumbnailing_algorithm.h/cc
Comment 1 by bugdroid1@chromium.org
, Jun 23 2017