Generate animated thumbnails for your video

Hi all, hope you are enjoying a great time of the year with your family and friends. Firstly, merry Xmas & Happy New Year!

The issue of not being able to generate a thumbnail for videos uploaded to Glide has bugged me for a while. Months ago I was working on a dancing app for LowCode.Agency and the client had to upload their own-made GIFs to Giphy, then paste the link back to the Sheet. It took so much time so I was wondering if there’s a workaround.

Recently @Robert_Petitto also talked about this in one of his posts and today I found out a way, using a combination of Zapier and Cloudinary.

Here’s the video.

How it works in the backend:

1/When a new video is uploaded to Glide, my zap is triggered and upload that video to my Cloudinary. Then I update the row in Google Sheets with the newly uploaded Cloudinary video.

2/I use a Google Sheet formula to add some parameters to the video link (e_preview and e_loop) to generate a preview GIF and make it loop endlessly.

Disclaimer: It does took some minutes for the Zap to finish running and the GIF to be loaded in Glide, I cut those parts out of the video.

Here’s a copyable link for the Zap: https://zapier.com/shared/ca55edac4deff8d68f47e6e3c43e2e6eec80bb0b

Here’s the formula in the Sheet:

={"Image link";ARRAYFORMULA(IF(B2:B<>"",SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(B2:B,LEN(B2:B)-4),"upload/","upload/e_preview/e_loop/")&".gif",""))}
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Bob, @eltintero, @Jeff_Hager, @Manan_Mehta, @Lucas_Pires, @Deena, @Darren_Murphy, @Rosewebstudio and others, I’m sure you will find your own use case for this.

There are many other interesting things available from this article:

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@ThinhDinh excellent thanks for sharing. Have your tried it yet?

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Super smart! Thanks for sharing bro :star_struck:
Merry Christmas :partying_face:

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Yes my trial is the video above haha. It took a while for the GIF to load, but it’s excellent.

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That is too Good!

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Oh yeah, how did I miss that. Excellent…

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