Setting video thumbnail programmatically | Community
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P
prithwi
Level 2
March 18, 2025

Setting video thumbnail programmatically

  • March 18, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 692 views

Hi,

 

Our customer is planning to migrate thousands of videos from a third-party system to Adobe Dynamic Media. During our PoC we uploaded few videos and found that thumbnails are generated automatically from the first frame of the video. But, customer ask is to keep the same thumbnail as they had in their existing system. So, we decided to download the thumbnail image from third-party system and manually associate in AEM. We referred this documentation to associate custom image as thumbnail for the video (https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-65/content/assets/dynamic/video#adding-a-custom-video-thumbnail-1) 

However, this manual process is mostly impossible when number of videos are approx. 40 thousands. I'm looking for a solution to programmatically set the custom image as videos thumbnail. Can anyone provide some insight if there is any API available for this? 

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

2 replies

A
Anil_Chennapragada
Level 4
March 19, 2025

hi @prithwi ,

Hope you have already figured a solution for this , else please find few thoughts below.

I dont think there is any OOTB approach to update the thumbnail images directly in bulk and would require a custom utility and you can try something like below

  1. Get the list of video paths that are uploaded into the DAM
  2. Save the list of thumbnails in a location
  3. Map the video paths and its corresponding assets paths in a file
  4. Create a Generic Utility
    1. The utility will read the video path from AEM
    2. Navigate to the jcr:content/metadata
    3. update the thumbnail with the new custom thumbnail asset
    4. Save the session

This utility can be executed in batches using a workflow/groovy script or scheduler 

 

Thanks,

Anil

    P
    prithwiAuthor
    Level 2
    March 19, 2025

    Thank you Anil for sharing your thought. Could you please tell me which property holds the thumbnail reference because I do not find any such property in the metadata node of video file. 

     

    Thanks

      P
      prithwiAuthor
      Level 2
      June 16, 2025

      I had a connect with Adobe support engineers few weeks ago. They have mentioned that in AEMaaCS there is no way to set the video thumbnail programmatically. Asset cloud service automatically pickup first screen from the video and set as thumbnail. 

      Adobe might introduce some API (they are already working on OpenApi) to make it happen. But for now it is not possible. Hence closing this thread.

       

      Thanks

      kautuk_sahni
      Community Manager
      kautuk_sahniCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      June 26, 2025

      @prithwi Did you find the suggestions helpful? If you need more information, please let us know. If a response resolved your issue, kindly mark it as correct to help others in the future. Alternatively, if you discovered a solution on your own, we'd appreciate it if you could share it with the community. Thank you.

      Kautuk Sahni
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