Hi, I saw quite a few topics with animated thumbnail under #script category. However there are also ones with an GIF attached, but shown as a static image on thumbnail preview (such as mine).
I initially thought it’s cached locally. But after several clear cache and device change, it’s still the same topics that gets an animated thumbnail.
Here is a random gif for testing just realized #site-feedback has thumbnails disabled
Is there any hidden rules to ensure the thumbnail gets animated?
(note: I’m referring to the thumbnail previews shown on the list of topics, not the embed when you are reading it)
Update:
Looks like any large gif has a chance to be optimized into a static frame.
As suggested by ibims, you can hide a dedicated gif in your post, that is small enough to avoid the compression criteria. Select it as the thumbnail by editing your topic title.
I now noticed there’s a “original” string in the animated one, whilst the static one has “optimized” in it.
Is this handled entirely by Discourse, or does the OP has any control over it?
That could be the case! If so I’m wondering what the cap is for them to be optimized… Would be lovely to have both a flashy thumbnail and a crispy gif in the article.
i wonder if the changing is due to some background processing of the gif that runs in an async task. So it might work one way for a few minutes, then change behavior after the background task completes?
I’ve got 3 topics, none of them have had animated thumbnails.
Then I added a second low-res GIF to my post, which is simply scaled down to 120px width.
This seems to avoid any further conversion, now all of them are now animated…
I think this drastic reducement fulfills all optimization criteria in file and image size, didn’t touched fps, tho.
However you still should post the high-quality GIF as well within the post.
