I noticed sometime today that now certain sites the article list has a thumbnail image for each article. Unfortunately this is slowing down newsblur for me and so I’m wondering if there could be an option to disable this. If there already is and I can’t find it, please let me know.
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Go to Settings, then preferences, then feeds and turn off image preview. I’m not a fan either.
I’m a fan, but it’s nice to have an option to turn them off.
I would like it more if it didn’t showed animated GIFs in an endless loop.
Thanks Geoff. I figured it was more likely that I just couldn’t find the setting. Sam’s really good at making things optional.
So I’ve gotten used to the image previews and absolutely love it. Why are folks turning it off? Or is this a sampling bias and only the people who want to turn it off are saying anything and the majority are quite happy with it?
almost definitely sampling bias, but in my case it slowed down response time of the website
It would be nice if it could be toggled per-feed in addition to globally. Some feeds rarely/never include an image, so it would be nice to reclaim that whitespace to the right of the date. Some wordpress feeds have only a tiny image indicating the number of comments currently on the post, and that looks hella weird in the image spot. Some feeds use the exact same set of stockphotos across many posts, and having it along the side of the list view isn’t helpful.
Overall I like the idea, but not for all feeds.
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Based on first impressions, I find the images don’t add value to the preview. Generally they’re fairly small, so don’t convey a whole lot, and the animated ones I find jarring, they’re visual noise that distracts from the content. I think the lack of a border between the images and the content window doesn’t help. I may come back to it later, but for now it’s turned off
Definitely sampling bias. I personally love it for similar reasons you do, but i can totally understand why other people wouldn’t. I’m glad there’s an opt-out option in case I am ever traveling somewhere with a slow internet connection.
I want to skim over the feed items as fast as possible. Reasons why thumbnails hinder more than help:
- each item takes more space
- the image generally does not help determining if i want to read the item
- it distracts from the title which is way more important
This is at least true for my high volume feeds. But these are the ones I optimize for.
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I love them on iOS, but on desktop, with the way my panes are set up, they look like this:
Maybe I’ll try resizing things and seeing if that helps, but my gut reaction is a nope.
I would also like them per feed, if I had them.
I think my general dislike is that the web version loads super quickly as always…and then the thumbnails start rolling in, taking a second or two to populate down the right-hand side, which distracts me from my reading. I may have turned it off before getting used to it.
Also, I have the browser window kind of wide (so that even long titles hopefully fit on one line), and they’re far enough to the right that I have to snap my eyes back and forth.
The #1 reason is that they don’t give me a per-story identity as they’re supposed to, because they have no whitespace between them; There’s just a unbroken collage made of seemingly random pictures down the right edge of my browser window.
More of what’s been said, in that they weren’t useful in List view due to size and location of the thumbs and feeds without images. They became a technicolor blurred ribbon on the edge of the page effectively. They might be marginally more effective if they were to the left of the feed name, but even with my browser window not fullscreen, they’re out of sight out of mind.
There is also a very noticeable load speed issue (windows 10, latest chrome, dsl).
I’m glad that the preference choice exists!
As an adherent of the fantastic grid-view, I must say: Text and picture are too far away from each other. One either reads the text or looks at the (tiny) picture, making it necessary (if one really wants to) to combine those two informations by “slow thinking” (Kahneman). Then again the grid-view: Picture and text combine easily by “fast thinking”.
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