How to upload "Thumbnail" images to TheMovieDb?

[theolaa]

I realize this is more of a TheMovieDb thing, but it pertains somewhat especially to Jellyfin. As far as I can tell, TheMovieDb only officially supports hosting Posters, Backdrops, and Logo images, yet Jellyfin supports several more types of images that can be assigned to media item. Of particular interest to me are Thumbnails. Thumbnails are used frequently - especially in the "Continue Watching" and "Next Up" homepage sections - and I consider them to be a core part of the "image package" for each media item along with Posters (called the "Primary" image in Jellyfin), Backdrops, and Logos.

Almost every item I've added to my library has had all the images I need, but every once in a while one won't have a Thumbnail image available. Now I consider myself handy with image software, so I have no problem whipping up such an image for myself, and in fact I've done so several times. The problem is, I'd like to share those onto TheMovieDb for others to use, but there isn't an option as far as I can tell. They only list Posters, Backdrops, and Logos as the available media categories for a given piece of media. I haven't asked directly on their forums myself, but I did see some previous discussions in my searching that seem to claim that those three categories are all they have. Yet when searching on Jellyfin, these Thumbnail images are definitely being hosted by TheMovieDb.

Does anybody have any insight on how this is supposed to work? I just want to share my thumbnails so others can use them too 😅

[bitmap]

Multiple metadata providers means multiple types of metadata. Those images may or may not come from TMDB. I don't have experience as a TMDB editor/contributor so I'm not sure I can answer this question effectively other than to say that a good portion of my thumbnails come from the image extractor metadata provider, both for show thumbs and continue watching thumbs. If we're talking about movies, depending on which metadata providers you have enabled and what order they're in, a different provider might provide those thumbnails rather than TMDB.

[theolaa]

Multiple metadata providers means multiple types of metadata. Those images may or may not come from TMDB. I don't have experience as a TMDB editor/contributor so I'm not sure I can answer this question effectively other than to say that a good portion of my thumbnails come from the image extractor metadata provider, both for show thumbs and continue watching thumbs. If we're talking about movies, depending on which metadata providers you have enabled and what order they're in, a different provider might provide those thumbnails rather than TMDB.

Hi and thanks for your response. I'm quite certain that TMDb is hosting the Thumb format images. While browsing images in Jellyfin you can click one and it will open in a browser, where I can see it is hosted at image.tmdb.org. Furthermore, I can see in the image provider dropdown that The Movie Database is often the only option.

It's rather perplexing to me how these images are being uploaded haha.

[bitmap]

You got me flummoxed. Even their API doesn't list thumbnails.

https://developer.themoviedb.org/reference/movie-images