Why do thumbnails sometimes fail to load? Saidit will display a thumbnail image for a JPG at a given URL on some days, and at other times the thumbnails fail to generate or display. Is it the image host or Saidit that blocks the thumbnail from being generated?

submitted by In-the-clouds from self.AskSaidIt

Examples

Thumbnail does not display, but the link goes to an image:
https://saidit.net/s/Artificial_Intelligen/comments/ati5/ai_art_dystopian_walmart/

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Thumbail displays for an image hosted at a different server:
https://saidit.net/s/news/comments/atdw/america_has_made_many_enemies_here_is_a_news/

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[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

It's the host. We try and display all images possible, some hosts make that more difficult than others.

Looking at your examples you can see that in general files.catbox.moe doesn't display thumbnails: https://saidit.net/domain/files.catbox.moe/

But midi.moe does: https://saidit.net/domain/midi.moe/

This probably has something to do with files.catbox.moe disallowing hotlinking, or disallowing whatever scraping method we use currently. Ideally to fix it, a new scraping method that works around this would have to be written for each host that doesn't currently function. And then the hosts also may change that scraping accessibility again and again, as we've had some hosts work for out thumbnails for a while, then stop working, then work again months later.

[–]In-the-clouds[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Thank you for your response. I'm glad it's not Saidit blocking certain hosts.

For awhile Saidit could generate thumbnails from certain hosts.... and then thumbnail generation suddenly stopped working. I guess someone looked at the server logs and didn't like how their service was being used. Even Imgur has failed at times.

[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yup. It might just be them wanting to reduce their bandwidth usage by turning off hotlinking or who knows, there's a million possible reasons

[–]In-the-clouds[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Hmmm. At this moment it appears Saidit will not generate a thumbnail for any host, not even YouTube.

screenshot