You are looking at documentation for an older release. Not what you want? See the current release documentation.
The gadget thumbnails are displayed in the Page Editor window when you edit a page. The thumbnail image size needs to be consistent for all gadgets in the list. The current size (in eXo Platform) is 80 x 80 px, so you should select an image of this size in PNG (preferred), JPG or GIF format for your gadget thumbnail.
The image can also be one from a public website (absolute URL), for example,
thumbnail="http://www.example.com/images/HelloWorld-icon.jpg"/
or from an internal image (relative URL):
thumbnail="image/HelloWorld-icon 80x80.png"/
.
Add that attribute to the <ModulePrefs> tag in the HelloGadget.xml
file.