No highlight for albums containing only movies

G1 does not allow user to use a movie file as highlight. This is understandable because for all movies G1 only uses a default thumbnail. But if an album contains only movies, the album will have no highlight. This makes such an album unusable.

In practice, I do not allow full size download for unregistered users, but want to allow them to download small movie files. The only meaningful way to give this permission is to group movie files into their own albums, and give permission for full size download in these movie-only albums.

Highlight and hide - I should have tried that; so far I have been editing the photos.dat file directly (and often cause problem).

Ideally, having a sliding thumbnail maker is the solution, then everything would work as the rest of Gallery. (Considering that most movies has higher resolution than the thumbnail, it's even possible to populate "sized" pictures in a meaningful way.)

Before that, I can think of a workaround for my needs: treat movies specially in "sized" view, so "sized" will download the actual movie. This way, I can mix these tiny movies with other pictures and don't worry about movie only albums. But this is not a very good way for general availability.

An alternative is to add a special permission such as "Users who can view movies". Because movies are already treated specially, this would not cause additional inconvenience. But the impact on the framework will need to be evaluated.

As to feature, I can think of allowing an album to "designate" a thumbnail for a movie, or to allow user to upload a thumbnail as an additional meta data for a movie. Gallery will not check whether the thumbnail actually matches content, only make sure the size is correct.