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why do some YouTube videos on lemmy have a thumbnail, while some don't? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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If you go to [email protected] and scroll you'll see some of the posts have a youtube thumbnail image, but not all.

I wanna post YouTube videos, but no one seems to engage much without a thumbnail, which makes sense, but I'm not sure what would result in the post actually having a thumbnail

If anyone has advice or guidance I'd appreciate it :) Thanks!

EDIT: so far it seems like it's potentially a combination of what version of lemmy the posters account is running, and how that instance is configured...

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It looks like your "edit" is right (version of lemmy and instance configuration are an issue), with the additional complication that sometimes where it is hosted makes a difference (sometimes the youtube summary is in a different language and/or won't grab it because of regional restrictions) and sometimes the reader app/web interface grabs their own thumbnails and/or may not display thumbnails and/or may even try to just embed the video. There was a post on techsupport a while back about this: https://lemmy.world/post/20180043

I post to [email protected] from slrpnk.net and to get a thumbnail, I do the following:

get a thumbnail image file. either grab it from wikipedia, imdb, or by a screencap that I trim. put that file somewhere on my computer.
use the web interface with default client. It has a "thumbnail URL" field (which I didn't see back when I had a lemmy.world account - probably version differences) but I can't just upload the image to that field, so I have to...
go to the post "body" input field and click on the "upload image" button to upload the thumbnail image file from my computer. This uploads the image to the server and adds a line of code to the body input field that looks something like this: ![](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/a-long-UUID.png)
copy the part from "https" to "png" and put it in the "thumbnail URL" field
usually I then delete that code from the post "body" input field
edit: of course, I still have to add the youtube URL in the "URL" field...

I think this adds thumbnails, but of course I can never be sure because someone can always use a client or configuration I'm unaware of. That's the price of freedom from a single corporate server and a limited choice of viewer clients.
Ideally this whole process would be easier or automatic. I imagine the situation/process will change as time gones on.