Image Previews
by Ben Ubois
Feedbin now features image previews in the center column.
![](https://assets.feedbin.com/assets-site/images/blog/2015-10-22/screenshot_one_small.jpg?98d29cd7cb8e687734c32027954ee25e)
The most important thing to me when building this feature was that only images that are reasonably high quality would show up here. To do this Feedbin uses a set of criteria that an image must meet in order to be chosen.
Feedbin can find a variety of images including:
- Images in the RSS post
- Poster frames from YouTube and Vimeo embeds
- Open Graph and Twitter Card meta data
One of my favorite operations that Feedbin does to ensure the quality of these image previews is facial detection using OpenCV. By getting a rough idea about where faces in an image might be, Feedbin is able to get a better crop. I first saw this idea used in Twitterrific and loved the results.
![](https://assets.feedbin.com/assets-site/images/blog/2015-10-22/crop_smart.jpg?78d6265e50b019e244a1424d4d92ba8e)
![](https://assets.feedbin.com/assets-site/images/blog/2015-10-22/crop_naive.jpg?4ddbcc72b3a810559d904e8216452d7f)
Adding images is a big visual change and if you prefer the old look you can turn off image previews in the Appearance settings.