LRC: Auto Create Video Thumbnail/Poster on Import

Report · May 08, 2024

Currently a thumbnail of a video file is automatically displayed only when the drive containing that video file is attached. LRC will display the first frame in the video. If the drive is unattached, an empty frame is displayed unless a manual process is executed to select and apply an image to be the poster/thumbnail.

This proposal requests that LRC automatically import that first frame and save it as the video thumbnail for display when its drive is unattached.

We use LRC as an index to many, many drives containing images and videos. We search for shots and clips in it and then go to the drive to work with those objects. Being able to see the some representation of the object is critical to knowing if we want to work with it. And LRC is great on that front with still images.

This proposal would save us the overhead time of manually selecting poster frames for the many video clips in which the initial frame is descriptive enough for us to understand the clip's content.

Report · May 08, 2024

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"Currently a thumbnail of a video file is automatically displayed only when the drive containing that video file is attached. LRC will display the first frame in the video."

Hmm, I'm not seeing that in my LR 13.2 / Mac OS 14.4.1:

Which version of LR and operating system?

Report · May 10, 2024

I'm on LRC 13.2 and Mac OS 14.4.1.

The difference may have to do with how you and I import. Here, we have a very large photo library across many hard drives and SSDs. We overwhemingly use LRC as an index into those drives—never for image editing—and use the ADD option on import. This leaves the images and videos in place and does not migrate any of them to be local to LRC. As I understand it, if you use an option other than ADD, you would not experience this issue.

This is what I see for video files when the source drive is not mounted:

And when a source drive is mounted:

Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding something.

Report · May 10, 2024

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In my test, which I repeated just now to verify, I used Import options Add and Build Previews: Standard to import from an external USB drive:

The behavior you're experiencing is clearly a bug. But if we can't produce a recipe to reproduce the bug reliably in other configurations, Adobe isn't likely to pay attention to the bug report, unfortunately.

Report · May 10, 2024

It smells like your catalog's previews database may be in an inconsistent state ("corrupted"). To test that, try these steps:

1. Connect one of the drives. Select 10 videos on that drive and do Library > Previews > Build Standard-Sized Previews. Disconnect the drive. Do those 10 videos still show thumbnails?

2. If not, make a new test catalog and import 10 videos from it with Add / Build Previews: Standard. Exit LR, disconnect the drive, restart LR. Do those 10 videos sill show thumbnails?

3. If those videos in the test catalog still show thumbnails, then this indicates the main catalog's preview database is corrupted. You could delete the preview database following the steps here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-gives-error-preview-cache.html

Then reconnect one of the drives, select all of the photos on it, and do Library > Previews > Build Standard-Sized Previews.

On my computer, LR builds video previews at the rate of a few per second. So this process could take a very long time.

Report · May 10, 2024

Thanks much, John, for your determination and suggestions.

I took one of the drives, selected the grey boxed videos, and applied the menu option to build standard previews. Once that drive was detached the previews were still available.

The problem most likely was that I had chosen to build minimal preview. I guess LRC excludes creating previews for video under this option, although digging through lots of pages about previews, I don't see it explicitly stated.

Since we aren't using LRC for image editing, we really only need thumbnails. So, I chose the more productive import. If my assumption is correct about LRC not generating video posters for for minimal preview import, I'll add a second step now to explicitly add previews for the videos. Of course, it still would be nice to get them without that step.

Report · May 10, 2024

"I had chosen to build minimal preview. I guess LRC excludes creating previews for video under this option,"

The bad behavior doesn't occur with my test -- I had tried Minimal, Embedded, and Standard, and all three sizes worked.

You might try importing a test video with Minimal and see if it exhibits the bad behavior. If you can replicate the bad behavior with a single test video in a new catalog, that would constitute an actionable bug report Adobe might pay attention to.

With photos, Minimal uses the tiny embedded thumbnails. But none of my 70 test MP4s from 16 different cameras have embedded thumbnails, so LR builds standard-sized previews right at import, even though I specified Minimal. Perhaps something about your videos is tripping up the preview building in some buggy way.

Report · May 10, 2024

I'm migrating us from MediaPro. I import an entire drive at a time. It has some videos and a lot of stills. I let the import run to completion, detach the drive, and move onto importing the next one. When I go back to look at the import, that's when I see the grey rectangles for the videos. The stills all have thumbnails. There are about 40K images and videos on each SSD.

If I reattach the drive and filter on videos, LRC generates thumbnails. It appears not do so during a large import.