Tip: Automatically update gadget screenshots

Monday, November 03, 2008 at 11:47 AM

When you submit your gadget, you specify URLs for large and small screenshots of the gadget. These screenshots represent your gadget in listings such as the Add gadgets window, online gadget directories, and the web page that's automatically generated for each gadget.

Unfortunately, there was no direct way to update these locations should they ever change — until now. This tip tells you how to update the screenshot URLs.

Add these tags to the gadget.gmanifest of your published .gg file:

<about>
  ...
  <thumbnailUrl>http://mysite.appspot.com/80x60_screen.png</thumbnailUrl>
  <screenshotUrl >http://mysite.appspot.com/300x255_screen.png</screenshotUrl>
  ...
</about>

The gadget gallery has the smarts to pick up these changes and use the URLs you specify to update the images in the gallery. Check out the gadget.gmanifest documentation for more details.

Just a reminder, the small screenshot should be 80x60 pixels. Also, be sure to take a look at this classic tip about submitting better screenshots.

Posted by James Yum, Developer Programs Engineer (Google Desktop Team)