Possible to set thumbnail to arbitrary image file?

ghmerrill

I suspect that this goes against the Zenphoto conceptual model and implementation, but ...

I would like to be able to set the thumbnail for an album to an image that is NOT a file in that album. That is, I'd like to "decouple" the notion of thumbnail from "thumbnail made from an image in the album", to which it now seems tightly bound. The motivation here involves using Zenphoto as a somewhat more general CMS in which the thumbnails would be distinctive images and not drawn from the "content" images of an album.

So far as I can see, there is no way (at least in the admin interface) to do this, and a thumbnail image may be selected for an album ONLY if its image exists at the same level or lower in the album/subalbum/image tree. Is there a way around this?

Alternatively, is there a way to (a) have an image I in album A, (2) select I to be the thumbnail for A, but (3) suppress display of I when the contents of A are displayed?

Again, the desire is to decouple "thumbnail" from "image in album" and be able to specify as a thumbnail an image that is not within (or is not seen to be within) the album.

Certainly the admin interface "knows" the path structure of the gallery/album hierarchy. Certainly it uses this to construct the path when "setting" an image for an album. So -- theoretically -- it must be possible to hand the image-setting code an arbitrary path for the thumbnail. But is there a way to accomplish this without severe modification or distortion of the current admin interface and code?

Any help/thoughts on this will be appreciated.

acrylian

If the reason for this is only that the album thumb should not show up in the album itself, just use an unpublished image. That will not show up unless you are loggedin so you see everything.

ghmerrill

Thanks much. That seems to work as desired. I'd experimented with the "unpublished" property earlier and couldn't get it to the result I wanted. Just user error, it would seem.