Image Previews

Feedbin now features image previews in the center column.

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.

Crop with face detection. Sample image from The Great Discontent.

Crop without face detection. Sample image from The Great Discontent.

Adding images is a big visual change and if you prefer the old look you can turn off image previews in the Appearance settings.