I’m running into a problem where I have one project in my studio with a particular set of character assets, and for that one set of assets, we’d like to have a static thumbnail field (meaning a set image that doesn’t change when new versions are added). However, if I set the Assets thumbnail field to “manual” on the page for these assets, it does that for EVERY Asset thumbnail field in our system, even though I don’t want that anywhere else. How do I override this for this particular set of assets? Is that even possible? (even within the same project we wouldn’t necessarily want this to apply to every asset)
I have managed a cheat before to create a 2nd thumbnail field visible on the grid page, but I’d like to know if there are other options available.
Thanks for the question! Thumbnail fields are hardwired in and aren’t something that can be replicated persay. You are correct that setting the Thumbnail field for a specific entity to one setting, such as Manual or Query mode will affect thumbnails for that entity across your site.
The only workaround for a secondary Thumbnail field would be to set your Asset Thumbnail field to Manual so you can have it display what you like (will be sitewide), and then you can create a new Query field that queries for the Version Thumbnail you want to be displayed. This field you can choose to be on whichever project you like. It will look something like this:
But, it’s not possible to create a replica of a Manual thumbnail field. Another alternative if you want something Manual-ish, is to create a new File/Link type field where you can upload an image to, but the display is a link to the image, and not the image itself.
I came up with this exact solution on my own before I saw this response, so that’s extremely validating! I implemented the reverse, so the Asset thumbnail stays the most recent version (which is what folks across the studio are used to) but in the rare cases I need a fixed thumbnail, I have that secondary field I can display. And then I changed the headers to be a bit more explanatory in this particular project. The one downside for this is that it only works in this one particular view (Assets/Grid)
@jlweiss, thanks for reporting back what you’ve done. You’re right, detail/thumbnail views will only show the original thumbnail field—no way to configure that differently at this time.
This just came to mind and might be more work than you want to do but you could also set the thumbnail field to manual and then have a script that runs in the Shotgun Daemon (or better yet, a webhook) that could set or update the field based on whatever criteria you want.
Maybe you could add a checkbox field to the entities that determine whether they will get updated to a version thumbnail or stay static.
That’s a good suggestion and if we get to where we need this more frequently I’ll look into that for sure. Right now we’re just using it in one section so the workaround I’ve come up with (the fancy query thumbnail) is working okay.
