It would be great if you had the option for a column to show the thumbnail for a linked entity rather than the entity itself. Clicking on the the thumbnail should take you to the same place that clicking on the previous contents of the cell would take you (ie, detail page or for attachments, the served up file).
-r
Hey Rob,
Take a look at my response to the "Ability to
Show a Column from more than 1 link away". We do this right now in our
studio. Our thumbnails and previews are only uploaded to the Elements
entity. Then they are linked in the shots, notes, versions pages with
a linked entity field. Most of our plate ingestion is totally automated
so while in the process of uploading input plates, 2d render plates, 3d
render plates and or all the passes our links are established via
automation. On a few occasions producers have asked me how to re-link
things in those cases where its common I have either made a custom page
for that entity specifically dedicated to thumbnail linking or I have
built cron jobs to specifically repair certain types of pages that must
be maintained regularly. The only real catch to this technique is you
have to push aside the thumbnail on all those detail pages to make room
for the new thumbnail. For the most part it really saves a lot of time
uploading thumbnails and centralizes all the thumbnails.
-romey
Romey, thanks for checking in. I can see how that is working for you, and maybe I should switch over to overloading Elements for what I'm trying to do, but in the case I'm looking at, we're using a File(Attachment) entity in order to upload quicktimes for our shots/sequences. Rather than having a column for that and a column for the shot/seq thumbnail, I was hoping to be able to just upload the thumbnail as the thumbnail for the quicktime and then show that instead of the actual shot/seq thumbnail. That way if you were to click on the image you'd get a quicktime rather than just a larger version of the still. Since File fields don't act like linked entity fields (can't directly link through to display their thumbnail), Shotgun doesn't let me do this.
Potentially we could switch over, but we're already using elements as shot elements, and I'm getting more wary of overloading entity types (see other feature request in this forum).
-r
I see where your going with this and agree so much. Space on a page is fleeting so fast. Another column means somebody needs another 24 inch monitor or an upgrade to a 30. It would be super nice to integrate the thumbnail and the preview into one field. A while back I ask for the ability to upload footage as Flash Screen Video this way you could actually play the footage in the thumbnail.
-Romey