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No thumbnail URL when posting (piefed.social)
submitted 2 days ago by ExtremeDullard@piefed.social to c/piefed_help@piefed.social
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Hey all,

I'm evaluating PieFed as a replacement for Lemmy, with a view to importing my two Lemmy communities to move them out of the failing Lemmy instance they're currently hosted on (a PieFed exclusive I understand). I've created an account and imported my Lemmy settings yesterday, and so far it's been more or less smooth sailing.

But there's one showstopper for me: when I create a post, there's no field to specify the thumbnail image URL. When PieFed guesses the image URL correctly, no problem. But here, I just posted this YouTube video, and just like on Lemmy half of the time, the thumbnail image didn't get picked up. On Lemmy, I always manually insert the thumbnail URL when I post YouTube links for that reason.

Similarly, some sites make it extra-hard for software to correctly guess the og:image - Reuters for instance - and so in those cases when it doesn't work, I manually set the correct thumbnail URL too.

Here on PieFed, there doesn't seem to be a provision to set the thumbnail URL.

Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something obvious? I really doubt this basic functionality is missing from PieFed.

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[-] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

FYI PieFed doesn't use thumbnails for youtube videos, it just embeds the video directly:

like this

[-] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

FYI PieFed doesn't use thumbnails for youtube videos, it just embeds the video directly:

Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my original post.

Indeed the video shows up fine in Piefed. What I meant was the view from Lemmy is devoid of thumbnail. For instance, my Youtube post seen from Sopuli:

https://sopuli.xyz/post/32680798

When I said it was a dealbreaker for me, it's because I (usually) always try to make posts with a thumbnail to make them more attractive on Lemmy. Even if it's just a question, I'll upload a picture to illustrate what I want to say, and then write whatever I want to write in the body.

I find it nicer to offer a visual clue in all my posts. But when you look at my Piefed Youtube video from Lemmy, the thumbnail it's just a bleak arrow on a bleak background. Not super appealing.

So I guess what I meant was that I want to manually supply a thumbnail URL for the benefit of Lemmy viewers.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

Yep, I understood but if Lemmy can't do thumbnails for youtube videos that's a Lemmy problem.

That said, we've had an open issue for this feature for a couple of months and the person who created it is a frequent contributor to PieFed so there's a very good chance it'll get coded quite soon.

[-] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah clearly a Lemmy problem, even when posting directly from Lemmy.The whole manual thumbnail URL thing is clearly a workaround for when the automatic thumbnailer is deficient.

But as a mere user, my aim is to make posts that are correct and somewhat appealing. So I work with what I have ๐Ÿ™‚

this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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