Turn off Feature image, per post, on Post UI?

So I’m trying to find a way to turn off the featured image on a post. Why? Because I’m embedding a YT video and want the Featured image to be a screenshot of the YT video, so that on the home page and any other list/feed-views a video post’s featured image looks like a video, from a user-centered UX point of view this is more legible and clear, that there are different types of content.

In the Source theme the featured image can’t be turned off on a post, so you end up with this redundant UX, example:

I could use a still from the video as a featured image, but then in my feeds of posts it looks the same as any other type of post. Unless I made some custom featured image graphic that I just use for videos, which would still look weird/uncessary to have a giant featured image above a video.

Or, I could not use a featured image, and then my post would be boring text-only in the feed list views on the home page and elsewhere. Also not good for inherently visual creative like videos.

I asked Ghost Pro Support about this and they added this request to the internal ideas list. And they said other themes have this ability to turn a featured image off on a post (but not on other views), but didn’t know what themes have this.

I’m sure there are many with this basic need. And it’s duanting having to hunt around trying one theme after another to see if this exists in any free or paid theme.

I searched for examples.
https://www.thenousnetwork.com/ …has what I want. But the images are all jpg not wepb.

Does anyone here know about themes that suppport this, and support/save all their images as webp?

Or, alternately, are there any themes where I can make a YT embed be the featured image? That might even be better.

Would love to see Ghost more catering to video creators, youtubers, etc. even though the origin of Ghost was biased to text/writers needs, so many of us are both/multimedia creators. Every serious Youtuber needs to have and own an email list, so there’s a business case to look at for better support in the core.

You can hide the image with css. Exact css needed will depend on the theme.

No theme can make a YouTube video be a featured image, but some themes use JavaScript to fake that.

Thanks. Yeah there’s that option, but having to edit the theme code and reupload it each time time I want to hide a featured image on one post isn’t sustainble.

Code injection on the individual post. Or if your theme puts a class for each tag, make a #hide-featured tag and .hash-hide-featured .your-featured-class {display: none}

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That’s a smart hack! Or maybe I should hire you some day and co-design a proper modern theme with this in the UI :)

Since themes can’t control the dashboard ui, probably not. :)

Wow. Ok I’m still new to Ghost but trying to launch a website is really revealing the detailed reality about how limited its use cases and personas it’s designed for. It’s micro-niche. I’ll still give it a go to learn and see how it benefits. With any software you have to use it for awhile to fully assess it.

But having been in web software for 25 years I can sense how challenged the product is due to core architecture assumptions revolving around text/writing (even super basic image layout patterns are absent eg a row of N images) and lack of modular extensibility that blocks 3rd party add ons. Limited narrow defined CMS with everything else manual coded for the most basic needs is tricky to grow in. We still need a leaner and cleaner FOSS Wordpress. Ghost is best optioned to become this.

Ghost is definitely a blogging platform. (Arguably a blogging and newsletter platform.) That’s a strength and weakness.

There are definitely times I wish for plugins, but I also really like not having to deal with the upgrade hell that comes with incompatible plugins, worrying about plugin security, and trying to sort out which plugin is messing up my site speed.

If you haven’t looked at it already, the gallery card may accomplish what you want for images.

For other types of elements, I fall back to some html snippets. Here’s some examples:

But yes, it’s not a landing page builder. It’s a blogging platform. Having said that, you can take reasonably well-formatted HTML (i.e. from a webflow export) and drop it into Ghost pretty easily. If you need fancy landing pages and a great blogging experience, that can be the best of both worlds.