Eliminate YouTube thumbnail black bars

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Sure, thanks for your interest.

Here’s a couple of videos that now look great in the embed, but show black bars when thumbnailed (and in preview):

og:image is:

480×360 39.9 KB

as you rightly point out … has black bars.

And

og:image is:

480×360 37.4 KB

as you rightly point out … has black bars …

NB Here is a “good case”:

og:image in this case is much bigger:

1280×720 71.5 KB

I’m currently using my Topic List Previews Sidecar plugin to regenerate the thumbnails whilst clipping them using the plugins bespoke overrides:

… but an automated way of doing this in core would be great as this is super annoying to have to keep doing semi-manually.

The challenge is identifying which images can be cropped?

Is it just a case of forcing 16:9 if you discover the youtube image is 4x3 or below a certain res (which means it must have black bars?).

I guess that might mean optimize image being passed a flag to tell it it’s dealing with youtube?

Seems strange to me that YouTube doesn’t standardise to 16:9 thumbnails?! Perhaps I’m missing something …

Thanks for enlightening me on the size difference!