Product Blog

Fun with images: new ways to upload and preview

Images have become an important part of the web browsing experience. Every day we’re creeping our friends’ photo albums, sharing the latest animated gifs with co-workers, or meticulously crafting our LinkedIn avatars.

At Disqus, we understand the power of images. Or as our colleague Anton says, “one rage comic says a thousand words.” So without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to Disqus Images.

With this new feature, Disqus generates preview thumbnails of any image URLs you’ve referenced in your comment. To view the original image, just click the preview thumbnail. We hope this will enhance the commenting experience by allowing commenters to express themselves visually.

Now,  old-school Disqus users might recognize that we’ve always done this. The difference is we now download and present these images to you as you’re typing your comment. This means you can preview your images before submitting, or remove them if they prove too embarrassing or career-ending.

We currently detect image URLs ending in png, gif, jpg, or jpeg, and your images will need to weigh-in under 2MB. Also, image previews are only available with our new Houdini theme right now. To change your theme, visit your Appearance settings.


Now, if your images aren’t already hosted on the web, or you’re not in the mood to type out the URL, you can still upload your images the old-fashioned way. Just use the + button in the lower-left corner of the comment box, select a file, and we’ll take care of the rest.

What’s next? For now, this preview functionality only works for image URLs, but we could add support for Flickr and Youtube. Image preview is currently only available with our new Houdini theme; you can choose the new theme by heading to your appearance settings.

We’d love to hear what you think. Try out the new feature in the comments below!

— George, Engineer @ Disqus