Gallery Improvements

The good people at Discourse have done some work to help us make our Gallery category more visual. Take a look…

Screen Shot 2020-05-06 at 11.40.26 AM

The thumbnail comes from the first image in the first post in the topic. Videos are not supported, but animated gifs are.

Let us know what you think.

Big thanks to @sam and @david24 and all the Discourse folks.

13 Likes

that’s nice, I see that there are many posts that don’t have an image in the first post of the topic, and they get a generic image. So maybe it’s possible to then get the first image from the topic starter it can find instead?

To be honest, I worry a lot about adding extreme complexity here.

When looking through the missing images I can see four patterns:

  • Video posted instead of an image
  • First image in the post is not a good image

@david24 (perhaps we should de-prioritize onebox?)

  • Image posted later on (a lot more rare)

(to be honest I found one earlier but can not find it that easily)

  • Post appears to need a rebake

In a few rare cases I saw posts that had an image but for some reason we did not pull the image out, a rebake fixed it… we will investigate this.


@dan perhaps we need a small task force here to go through and clean up first posts so they always include an image? For the ones with videos you could play the video and then screenshot a useful frame and add it to the OP?

Maybe this is a job for TL3s/4s on the forums?

@sam other solution could be that the topic starter can flag the image that needs to be on top. This way a gallery can stay up to date.

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This was one of the first issues brought up when we looked at it internally. I presumed it would be very difficult to render a thumbnail of the video.

For the ones with videos you could play the video and then screenshot a useful frame and add it to the OP?

Personally, I don’t mind this solution. I think we could get into the habit of making sure that video posts also include an image. I’m open to technical solutions, but I guess this feels like the path of least work. Others here may disagree of course, but I’m all for keeping it simple.

2 Likes

Seems it was mistakenly applied to the Grasshopper category too. At least on mobile.

It would require a lot of development work, yes - sticking to images is more feasible.

Good catch, thanks. I meant to apply it to Grasshopper, not Grasshopper. Should be fixed now.

3 Likes

(perhaps we should de-prioritize onebox?)

@sam and @david24

I think this would be nice to do. I’m seeing quite a few of these, for example I just cleaned up this one:

by moving the image above the onebox unfurled link, but that’s less-than-ideal. Here is one I haven’t cleaned up yet (for debugging purposes):

Topics such as these two are problems:

:point_up_2: Topics with images hosted on another site are relatively rare, but it would be good if they did work.

FYI, I’m going through these and it’s not too much work, to be honest. We might need to work with users who post videos to post an image as well, but I don’t think it will be too onerous.

1 Like

hello,

may i suggest that we could also get into the habit of adding a video tag when posting?
or add in the description title. then we can distinguish vids from images.