External URLs

You can include remotely hosted images and videos in your gallery by using the external source type.

[!WARNING] Remote images and videos are disabled by default to protect your privacy. You must enable Allow remote images in Settings → Gallery View before external sources will load.

Configuration

To use external URLs, set the type to external and provide a list of urls. URLs can be plain strings or { url, caption, video } objects.

Field	Type	Required	Description
type	string	Yes	Must be external.
urls	list of strings or objects	Yes	List of remote image or video URLs, or { url, caption, video } objects. Set video: true for a video whose URL doesn't end in a video file extension.

Example

```obs-gallery
sources:
  - type: external
    urls:
      - url: https://example.com/photos/cover.jpg
        caption: "Sunset over the Pacific"
      - https://cdn.example.org/gallery/img123.webp
view:
  type: thumbnail
```

Videos

A URL ending in .mp4, .m4v, .webm, .mov or .ogv is a video (a query string after it is fine). For a video URL without one of those endings, add video: true:

```obs-gallery
sources:
  - type: external
    urls:
      - https://cdn.example.org/clips/waves.mp4
      - url: https://media.example.org/stream/1234
        caption: "Launch day"
        video: true
view:
  type: masonry
```

• Playing: the image viewer streams the video straight from the website, so it starts quickly and plays at any size (the Largest remote video to play limit doesn't apply).
• Still frames: the tile shows a frame from about a second into the video. A website has to allow other sites to read its videos (CORS) for the frame to be taken straight away. If it doesn't, a video up to 50 MB is downloaded once to take the frame (not on phones or tablets), and larger ones, or ones whose size the site doesn't report, show a dark placeholder with the play badge.
• Pages that embed a player (YouTube, Vimeo and similar) aren't video files and can't be shown.

Notes

• Remote images are not downloaded into your vault. To keep permanent local copies, mirror the assets manually.
• Enable Validate remote content type in Settings to have the plugin perform a lightweight HEAD request before loading each URL. This reduces accidental loading of non-image resources at the cost of one extra network request per URL. Videos pass when the site reports a video/ type.
• The Remote load timeout setting controls how long the plugin waits before giving up on a slow URL. You can change it in the settings.