So, while almost nobody has noticed yet, its pretty cool that the art portal now lets you upload a seperate thumbnail image entirely after uploading a work. this greatly assists compositions where characters are a bit too far apart to be readable, but you dont just want to make the thumbnail an extreme close up of one characters face (ive squished elements together for three works now and i love the ability to do so) as well as perhaps make a background transparent, increase the contrast, make the thumbnail a better postage stamp size view of what the image at full size is.

this ability to modify the sumbission metadata after the fact proves that something that had been on my mind for a while would not be impossible: allow an artist to modify the "you might also like" works manually.

currently, it simply displays the 8 (4 on mobile) most recent art sumbissions, including sketches, that are within the user's filtered content settings. this is not a bad system, but it has one big problem, in that it provides no control whatsoever to the uploader.

a proposed solution is to add another similar box, that allows the artist to specify up to 3 works that will always appear at the start of the reccomendations, as long as the image meets the viewer's filtering settings. if not, it is simply replaced by the default of most recent works.

advantages of doing this:

more likely that you will actually enjoy the works "you might also enjoy". many of us have varied works, and i know that my illustration of naked ladies and my blood soaked body horror monsters probably do not have a perfect audience overlap. i can direct people who like one of my works in the direction of other works that i think they are most likely to enjoy.

Comics and sequential works would become much easier to read. the comic's creator would simply make the only reccomended work the next page of the comic, and it would be easy to hit the next one in sequence. currently, if you want to read a comic on the art portal, if they didnt link to it in the description manually, you have to back out to thier gallery, which can mean more scrolling, more loading, and so on. this can even be partially fixed retroactively if, upon implementation of the feature, every image is set to automatically have the first reccomended work be the very next thing that artist uploaded after the current work. not that this is a required thing but it would be a neat way to solve a problem even for inactive accounts.


a tiny little mockup of where exactly to put the feature is here that i spent a whole 20 seconds making.

so yeah. this would be a cool thing to have.