Tip! How to Create “Thumbnail” Links in Canvas

In web parlance, a thumbnail is a scaled down (sometimes also cropped) copy of a larger picture or graphic. A thumbnail link is a thumbnail which is also a link to a larger (or more complete) copy.

Some of you may read the title of this post and say to yourselves, “That’s easy!” because it used to be. But changes to the Canvas “rich content editor” have rendered this impossible without this one weird trick.

1. In the RCE, open the Insert menu, hover or arrow to the Image sub-menu, and select the Course Images option. (This assumes you’ve already uploaded the image. If you haven’t, select the Upload Image option for this step, take care of that first.)
2. In the Add panel, find and select the image.
3. Dismiss the Add panel.
4. Select the image in the RCE.
5. Click the Image Options pop-up button.
6. On the Image Options panel, switch Display Options from Embed Image to Display Text Link (Opens in a new tab).
7. Click the Done button to dismiss the Image Options panel. Your formerly embedded image has been replaced by a text link to the image.
8. In the RCE, place your insertion point between two of the characters in the text link.
9. Repeat Steps 1-3! (But be sure to choose Course Images in Step 1, because you’ve definitely uploaded it already.) This will embed the image inside the text link.
10. In the RCE, place your insertion point after the last character on the right side of the image and use the Backspace key to remove all the characters on the right side of the image.
11. Place your insertion point after the last character on the left side of the image and use the Backspace key to remove all the characters on the left side of the image. Now all that’s left in the link is the image.

A similar process will allow you to use an image as a link to anything. Just do whatever you need to do to create a text link to what you want, instead of steps 1-7, above. Then use steps 8-11 to get the image into the link and take out the text.