Thumbnail Preview Size

[Deadman]

I'm new to creating wallpapers within Wallpaper Engine and so far I've made four at 4k sizes. The animated thumbnails for two of them have a black border around them even though when I made the thumbnail (via the built in capture preview option) I used the full height. Any ideas? To show what I mean have a look at my workshop items. Two are fine, two are not yet all are 4k size. https://steamcommunity.com/id/deadman_uk/myworkshopfiles/

Also when clicking on the actual wallpaper it only shows a tiny 256x256 preview. Can we not make larger previews so people can at least see the entire wallpaper? Wallpapers are rectangle in shape but the previews are squared.

[Tim]

The built-in GIF generator will resize the preview GIF as it sees fit to ensure that the Steam servers will not reject the preview file (file size limit).

GIF is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ old format unfortunately and file sizes can quickly go up. The GIF on your last upload is almost 600 KB, so it was likely above 1 MB in size before it resized it to 160x160px. That does not sound like much but if you consider that a single page of search results contains 30 items, it can quickly add up to 15 - 20 MB just to download all preview images which is pretty crazy.

Generally, it's fine to go down all the way to 128x128px because that is the resolution that Wallpaper Engine actually requests from the Steam preview image servers. You can add additional images (and YouTube previews) on the Workshop page of your item if you wish to do so, but the preview image itself has to fall under these hard limitations.

If you want to be in full control of the preview image, use a free tool like ScreenToGif and record a 256x256 GIF yourself:

https://www.screentogif.com/

You'll see that you will run into the 1 MB size limit quickly though, it's best to reduce the FPS limit to 10 or lower at that resolution.

[Deadman]

Thanks Tim, I'll play around with the information I've just learnt from you and see what I can do. I lowered the FPS of the preview and it didn't help so I guess it's still too large in filesize. I didn't try the 128x128 though so I'll give that a go. I'll also try the app you linked to. It's good to know I can add additional images/animations/videos to the workshop page.