@dansup @pixelfed The screenshot idea sounds good. To work around the blank picture issue, you could employ similar logic as sites & applications that offer video thumbnail suggestions by scanning the video. I'm sure there's a library out there that can assist, but as I don't use PHP any more I can't name one sorry. Another option is allowing the user to select the story "preview" time code

As an aside, screenshot vs. retain video for author could be a setting configurable by the instance admin