Live Image Preview

Live Image Preview is a one-point rendering surface. It takes the point you are hovering or the point you selected, looks for something visual in its metadata, and draws it. For most spaces that means an image; for chemistry and biology spaces it can also mean a SMILES structure or a protein viewer, because the panel is a host for preview plugins rather than a picture viewer.

Where to find it

Open View > Inspection > Live Image Preview. The panel needs point metadata to have finished loading.

How it fills

The panel shows one point at a time, chosen in this order:

1. The current selection, if there is one. It stays pinned to that point.
2. The point you are hovering on the map, when the panel is linked (the default).

Unlink the panel from the link button in the tab bar and it stops following hover, so it only ever shows the point you clicked. When there is no selection and no hover, the panel reads No display data found. That message also appears when a point is showing but nothing in its metadata could be rendered.

What it renders

For each point, in order:

1. A metadata thumbnail. If any metadata field is a thumbnail URL, that image is shown at 640x360 and nothing else runs. Mantis recognizes explicit fields such as thumbnail, thumbnail_url, image, image_url, preview, cover and their variants, and it also derives a thumbnail from a YouTube or Panopto video URL.
2. Every enabled preview plugin, over every metadata value plus the title. Each plugin is asked whether it can render a value; every match is drawn, and multiple matches stack vertically in a scrolling column.

Three plugins ship by default, and you can see and toggle them under Plugins > Manage Plugins:

• Image Plugin renders data URLs, raw base64 and image URLs.
• SMILES Renderer parses a value as a SMILES string and draws the molecule.
• Protein Viewer Plugin renders a known protein id in an embedded NCBI iCn3D viewer.

The chemistry and protein renderers are gated by field name, so they only fire when a metadata key hints at that domain: smiles, inchi, mol, sdf, compound, chemical or ligand for chemistry; uniprot, pdb, protein, sequence or amino for proteins. That gating is what stops an ordinary text field in a non-chemical space from being drawn as a molecule.

Plugins > Import Plugin loads your own renderer from a JavaScript or TypeScript file; it then appears in the same list and participates in the same resolution.

Limits

• One point at a time. It has no gallery or grid; for every image across a selection, use the Summarizer’s Images tab.
• There is no zoom, no lightbox and no click-to-expand. Images render at a fixed width.
• It is independent of the map’s view mode, and works the same in 2D, 2.5D and 3D.
• It is not the only place images appear. The Inspector renders image-valued metadata inline in its metadata table, and map flashcards show point thumbnails. Those are separate code paths, not this panel.
• Video is handled by a different panel. See Video Player.

Read nextVideo PlayerThe same idea for YouTube and Panopto content attached to points.