Modifiable thumbnail for paper list

Feature requests
1

I’ve seen a few previous posts asking for a thumbnail preview of the paper list. For us visual types, this would be HUGE. Maybe even the option to choose the thumbnail from the paper list. If storage is an issue, the thumbnail could be stored locally on my google drive. I can’t emphasize how much this would help.

I find I do a great job of putting papers into my library, but what I remember the most from my papers are the figures. Sometimes I cant find the paper I’m thinking of, and eventually I end up going out to google images and re-searching to try to find the paper - which works surprisingly often. (doesn’t help that parent folders don’t show papers within sub-folders… seriously… what’s the point of having subfolders? anyways… back to thumbnails).

When I had a literal pile of papers, I usually left a paper open to whatever page was the most relevant and could easily scan my pile to find the paper I was looking for. But Paperpile lacks a basic visual way to interact with our library. Please reconsider this - it would make this so much more useful for us mild dyslexics =)

2

Thanks for sharing your perspective in such detail @GRomanoIbarra; it’s really helpful to understand how you work. A thumbnail or cover-image view would make it easier to visually navigate a large library, especially for those who rely on figures to recall papers. At the moment, the web app only supports the list view, and we don’t have thumbnail previews on the immediate roadmap. But feedback like yours is what helps us prioritize, so I’ve added your +1 to our internal feature tracker.

On your point about folders and subfolders: you’re right, parent folders don’t currently display papers from nested subfolders and search results from subfolders are not included when searching parent folders. That’s by design, but we know it can feel limiting if you expect folders to work more hierarchically. I’ll also make sure your feedback on that is recorded for the team.