Change thumbnail of media

[Grover]

On images and videos that we upload we have the option to 'Change Thumbnail'.

What is this function for? In what circumstances would it be needed to change the thumbnail of a picture/video that we upload? I understand why it would be handy to change the thumbnail of an album, so we can choose a thumbnail that better represents an album. But a thumbnail that represents a single picture/video, is supposed to represent (and therefor resemble)... this single picture/video, so what would be a reason to change that?

There must be a good reason I am missing, otherwise it would not be put in I guess.

 

[Chris D]

It's certainly more useful for videos.

Where videos are concerned, there are some media sites where it would require custom development to retrieve a thumbnail or in the case of Facebook, it just isn't possible to programmatically retrieve a thumbnail from a Facebook video (in a useful way). So with that in mind, it's not unrealistic to see this as a thumbnail:

That's the default "I can't get a thumbnail for this video" thumbnail

So people may prefer to replace that with their own thumbnail that they upload themselves.

But, even if a thumbnail is retrieved for a media site automatically, who's to say that the thumbnail provided by the media site is necessarily the best one for the video they are adding?

So, someone may prefer to upload a thumbnail that they better depicts the content of the video.

Where image thumbnails are concerned, yeah, I agree, it's less likely to be used; but it seemed unnecessary to arbitrarily restrict it on the basis that it was less likely to be used.

 

[Jeremy]

What if you don't want the thumbnail to be an accurate representation of the media? Say you run a site which can have adult content, so you upload a new "NSFW" thumbnail so while browsing it doesn't accidentally appear?

Some services (video) don't have the ability to auto generate a thumbnail, so it is required to set the thumbnail manually.

It didn't exist, there was a suggestion for it and it was implemented.
https://xenresources.com/threads/manually-upload-a-thumbnail-image.795/

 

[Grover]

Thanks for these extensive replies/explanations. I knew I was missing something indeed... it makes sense now.