Feature Request/Idea: Thumbnails should be created for more (and even custom) datatypes

[sergejzr]

Dear Dataverse community,
Thumbnails should be created for more (and even custom) datatypes
Overview of the Feature Request

What kind of user is the feature intended for?
(Example users roles: API User, Curator, Depositor, Guest, Superuser, Sysadmin)
Curator, Depositor, Guest, Searcher

What inspired the request?
We noticed that the thumbnails are only generated for images and PDFs.
The source of edu.harvard.iq.dataverse.dataaccess.ImageThumbConverter clearly says that thumbnails are only attempted to be generated in case of image or pdf:

            // try to generate, if not available: 
            boolean generated = false;
            if (file.getContentType().substring(0, 6).equalsIgnoreCase("image/")) {
                generated = generateImageThumbnail(storageIO, size);
            } else if (file.getContentType().equalsIgnoreCase("application/pdf")) {
                generated = generatePDFThumbnail(storageIO, size);
            }
....

What existing behavior do you want changed?
Actually, the thumbnail creation in dataverse seems to rely on Imagemagick. Imagemagick can deal with a variety of data formats and even with custom formats. The motivation for limitation of this functionality in dataverse to images and pdfs is not clear. I can imagine having a customizable property where the Sysadmin can tell, which datatypes to send for conversion (and how the conversion command should be built)

Any brand new behavior do you want to add to Dataverse?
This is not a "brand new" functionaliity request, I guess..

Any related open or closed issues to this feature request?
The issue #6450 is related (though it embraces a much larger problem)

PS: Our fresh research data management team at the Bonn University decided to employ Dataverse as the research data repository thus we might be bit more active here in the future and produce such requests more often, thanks!

[djbrooke]

Thanks @sergejzr ! We're certainly interested in creating thumbnails for more file types. In a recent release we enhanced our file-type categorization to at least get more appropriate generic thumbnails, but this would be a bigger improvement.

[pdurbin]

@sergejzr good idea. Any interest in making a pull request? 😄

By the way, thumbnails from geotiff files were requested here:

• Ingest: Add geotiff support #2740