How to enable thumbnail for iframe widget

  • 17 May 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 370 views

Hi!

I’m wondering if there’s a way to add thumbnail for my custom iframe code? I noticed that some popular embed providers like Youtube and Soundcloud have thumbnails, but if would be cool if I can somehow enable thumbnails (preferably using some kind of API) for my own iframe.

How come some iframes have thumbnails and some don’t? Does Miro use Embed.ly behind the scene to get extra data to display?


2 replies

@Kenneth Chen

I don’t have an exact answer — but maybe the search  term “unfurl” can yield support/ research leads. That’s  the term for that seemingly meta-data-structured unpacking of rich media from html embeds.
 
It would be cool to know what your investigation discovers.  :)

Thanks for the lead! I looked into the oembed spec and implemented a proof of concept in my app. There’s also strong evidence that Miro is using the thumbnail_url properties in an oembed object to display the thumbnails, so I was hopeful that if I implemented the oembed API endpoint in my app Miro would recognize it.

And of course it didn’t… Which is a bit upsetting as everything feels like a blackbox and I’m again out of leads. I tested my endpoint on the Embed.ly validator and it seems to be working fine. The only tester that’s not working is the iframely debugger and my guess is that it’s because my app is not whitelisted on their service.

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@Kenneth Chen 

I don’t have an exact answer — but maybe the search  term “unfurl” can yield support/ research leads. That’s  the term for that seemingly meta-data-structured unpacking of rich media from html embeds.
 
It would be cool to know what your investigation discovers.  :)

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