A lot of animations are straight forward, and the automatically generated thumbnail from the first frame is fine.

However, many animations (particularly longer ones) start with a title card, establishing shot, or even a completely black screen. In these cases, many users click on an animation with content they don't want to see, but don't necessarily have blacklisted, and many other users skip the post because a black screen or establishing shot tells them nothing about the post.

It would be great if there was some way to add a thumbnail to webm uploads, whether that means that either...

• when the video is uploaded, an automatically generated set of screenshots from every 10/30 seconds of the video are shown, and the uploader can pick the shot they feel represents the animation the best...
• ...or alternatively, if a webm is uploaded, an optional second "upload file" text box appears, which allows the user to upload a thumbnail

Of course, if the second method was used, there would be a rule that the video thumbnail must be an unaltered frame from the video itself, maybe with an automatic check that the screenshot image matches the resolution of the video.

The second option sounds like it would be less work for the technical staff, with the tradeoff being a need for a lot more attention from the mods. Maybe we should cut out the middleman and just make it the mods' responsibility to screenshot and upload the thumbnails for videos that end up in their queues. Giving mods that power would also address the problem of also needing new thumbnails for the hundreds of videos already on the site.

or you could just have a separate seek bar and player to select a tumbnail manually out of every frame in the video?

dripen_arn said:
or you could just have a separate seek bar and player to select a tumbnail manually out of every frame in the video?

I haven't seen that on any video uploading site, so I didn't think of that.

dripen_arn said:
or you could just have a separate seek bar and player to select a tumbnail manually out of every frame in the video?

This sounds perfect if it's possible

Imagine if other users could edit this too, like we can edit tags and descriptions. Just in case the OP forgets to select a custom thumbnail

https://e621.net/forum_topics/25872

This gives you thumbnails at least, with hover and play.