Thumbnails aren't working…

I took another look at this…The plugin is actually outputting 2×2 blank pngs in the link-library-favicons and link-library-images directories.

The thumbshots.com service has been causing me and my users a lot of grief over the past few months. They were suggested by a user a while back and worked ok. The thing about thumbnail services is that they often stop offering their free services over time.

I just modified Link Library to use another service called Robothumb instead. Please try upgrading to the latest version and generating thumbnails again.

Nobody can afford to offer a completely free service for very long. ShrinkTheWeb offers a free service (up to certain limits) and has done so successfully since 2008. I’ve never even heard of Robothumb, which is saying a lot considering I stay on top of competitors that come and go. That is another one that will give you headaches in time. They just don’t spend the money necessary to provide a quality service.

This morning I went ahead and tried thumbnail generation again and still have had no success. Will look into the Robothumb alternate, but perhaps you should also look into shrinktheweb.com as Puravida suggested? Them I have heard of before.

I personally don’t mind paying for a thumbnail generation service as long as I can test it to make sure it works. I know for the use we have for this plugin and their services, we will need to pay for it due to the quantity, which we’re 100% ok with.

I have a few suggestions for you…

1. The manual image assignment under Advanced, it would be much more user friendly to have a upload function with it automatically displaying the thumbnail size. For most of our clients, having to upload via the Media Library, try to recover the thumbnail link and then paste it into the text field just isn’t going to work.
2. Automated thumbnail generation immediately upon creation of a link if using the API would be best (with an option on each link to regenerate if needed). We won’t permit out clients to access the settings as not only would the be completely overwhelmed, but they would likely break something. ??

Also! Is their a way to hide the first Category on the “Only show one category at a time” view? It is confusing to users to show the first Category and I can’t seem to find a way to disable that in the settings, though I very well might be overlooking it.

I too have a couple clients sites reporting the thumbs weren’t working.

When I went into the library and clicked “generate thumbnails….” it worked with robothumb BUT a number of the images are blank.

With BigShots I was able to set a default image with the client logo when the thumbnail failed.

I also remember we may have uploaded an image for websites that refused to work with Thumbshots???

Any comments/ideas on these points?

I can look at adding an option to work with a few different providers (Robothumb, Thumbshort, ShrinkTheWeb).

I had a paid account at Thumbshots and it was working great. I think we had to manually create 1 or 2 thumbs and it’s been good for a couple years.

I’d like to go back to Thumbshots but the CID is no longer there?

I removed all of the Thumbshots code. Will put it back in, with an option to choose provider either this evening or tomorrow evening.

I did not get to this issue but definitely will tomorrow night. Sorry for the trouble.

If you want to roll back to a version before I made the change to the tumbnail generation until I fix the issue, I just tagged the last previous version so you can download it here:

https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/link-library.5.8.12.7.zip

Yannick

I have re-integrated Thumbshots in the plugin. You will need to go to General options and select Thumbshots as the thumbnail generation service (Robothumb is default). The CID field will re-appear when you make that selection.

Please let me know if you have any issues with this newly re-integrated code. I have tested it and everything seems good but I may have missed something.

Any answers to my queries on my 3rd post?

I did test out Robothumb and it worked well, but the thumbnails are terribly fuzzy.

You mean the query on hiding the first category shown? Sorry, missed it. Would have been better to open a different thread for it.

Just check ‘Hide category on start in single cat AJAX mode’

Thanks for adding Thumbshots.org back to the plugin.

Changed settings and all is working well!