Thumbnail API Documentation
The Thumbnail API was developed to give access to the cached thumbnails that are generated upon aggregation of the items in Europeana. Thumbnails are generated for all image resources that are referred through by edm:isShownBy, edm:hasView or edm:object properties. Only one of these thumbnails is chosen for the edm:preview property, however, all are accessible via the Thumbnail API using the URL of the media resources they were extracted from.
To know whether thumbnails have been generated for a record, you can use the Search API and add has_thumbnail=true to your search criteria (preferrably in the qf parameter), or check if the edmPreview field in either Search or Record API responses have a value (which is the URL of the thumbnail).
Retrieving thumbnails from content resources
The Thumbnail API is able to retrieve a thumbnail for any content resource that has been processed by Europeana.
Request v3
The Thumbnail API doesn't require any form of authentication, providing your API key is optional.
A call to v3 of the Thumbnail API is an HTTPS request following the structure:
GET https://api.europeana.eu/thumbnail/v3/[SIZE]/[MEDIA].[FORMAT]Parameter | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|
SIZE | path | The width size of the thumbnail. There are only two width sizes for thumbnails, namely: “200” and “400” px. |
MEDIA | path | The identifier of the media resource from which the thumbnail was generated. It corresponds to the hash value of the URL where the original media resource is accessible. |
FORMAT | path | The format of the image. Only “jpg“ is supported. |
Response
A image resource, corresponding to the thumbnail, is returned in the requested size.
Request v2
Similarly to v3, v2 doesn't require any form of authentication, providing your API key is optional. As opposed to v3, v2 always returns an image, whether the thumbnail exists or not.
A call to v3 of the Thumbnail API is an HTTPS request following the structure:
GET https://api.europeana.eu/thumbnail/v2/url.jsonParameter | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|
url | query | The URL of the content resource from which a thumbnail was generated. Note that the URL must be encoded. |
size | query | The width size of the thumbnail. There are only two width sizes for thumbnails, namely: “w200” or “w400”. |
type | query | Type of the record which informs, in case the thumbnail does not exists, which default thumbnail should be returned. Acceptable options are: “IMAGE”, “SOUND”, “VIDEO”, “TEXT” or “3D”. |
Response
A image resource, corresponding to the thumbnail, is returned in the requested size or, if no thumbnail is found matching the URL, a default thumbnail corresponding to the requested type is returned.