Suggestion: automate generating preview images

  • I had to dig for a few hours in order to understand how to generate previews for already embedded videos. It turned out I had to manually invalidate oEmbed cache for the posts which included YouTube and Vimeo content (either via the wp-cli command line tool or by deleting stuff in the oEmbed table, a bit scary though).

    Then I visited each article and the thumbnail were downloaded.

    Could this be automated? I think a lot of people would find this counter intuitive.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Matthias Kittsteiner

    (@kittmedia)

    Hi there!

    I’m not a fan of altering existing content, which it would in this way. Additionally, since the oEmbed cache need to be renewed, which is a heavy and time-consuming task, I’m not a fan in doing something like that automatically.

    Besides that, there already is a WP-CLI command for clearing the embed cache. So I don’t think I need to implement something similar by myself.

    Best regards,
    Matthias

    Thread Starter Lazza

    (@lazza)

    Thank you. I agree that the default behaviour makes sense, although IMHO should be documented somewhere. Or maybe it is and I just missed it, because it took me quite a while to understand what I was doing wrong and why my thumbnails were not showing up.

    The suggestion concerns adding a way for the user to “manually” trigger this, like a button in the backend, for each post or a global one. This is because:

    • Simply opening a post and saving it does not clear the cache, unfortunately
    • Not all folks are going to be familiar with wp-cli or are going to be able to SSH into their server
    • Some people might have dozens of posts with embeds, spanning several years before… on which Embed Privacy correctly protects the embed (so it intervenes on them at runtime) and the fact it does not fetch thumbnails might be confusing for users

    Or maybe (I don’t know if this could work), it might be possible to keep track of embeds that already have a thumbnail or not. When somebody first visits a post with an embed without a thumbnail, it fetches it on the fly.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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