Support seeing the embedded thumbnails of audio files (Community Wishlist/W455)
On Commons, often people upload music audio in video format. I tried categorizing them into c:Category:Video files that should be audio files. With a video, a visual such as the album cover is shown on the file page or when embedding the file somewhere. This is not the case with audio files which display no graphic.
The current proper way to upload audio files where an associated graphic like the album was released under a free license I think would be to upload the music audio as audio file and the album cover graphic separately which could then be manually added to the audio file's Information box (the file description in file information template).
I think if the graphic is original and a YouTube video is set to CCBY, then that graphic is also CCBY and that this is the same for other sites like Bandcamp. However, sometimes an unfree graphic may have been used. See my post Audio of music likely contain copyvio thumbnails – thumbnail provider database? on Commons. In this context, being able to see the embedded thumbnail is also useful because one can then remove it from those files where it's not CCBY. For other cases, a thumbnail is something many want to see for music audio as well as some other kinds of audio files such as soundscapes (could e.g. be a photo of the location the recorder was placed). This is why most music players and music sites do display a thumbnail. Please make this possible also on Commons (and by extension probably also Wikipedia).
This could be implemented as part of related wish W317: A proper audio player
Unassigned
People searching and listening to audio on Commons
- Created: 17:01, 30 October 2025
- Last updated: 17:16, 27 March 2026
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)
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