How do I change the thumbnail of a trello board without changing the background?

[Emily Hughes]

How do I change the thumbnail of a trello board without changing the background? See attached photo.  I want to change the thumbnails -right now these alwso have to be the background of the board, but I don't want that.

[Iain Dooley]

@Emily Hughes you can't do this, but what are you trying to achieve? There might be another way to get the same outcome.

[Emily Hughes]

We want to be able to see the name of the board in the thumbnail view (as opposed to just a solid color) without having to change the background of the board. There are more boards than colors and you can't see the full title in the preview, as you can see in the screen shot I posted. We should be able to see at a glance which board is which and the solid color thumbnails serve little purpose.

[Iain Dooley]

@Emily Hughes I actually prefer to create a "board of boards" rather than use the boards menu, for this reason:

https://blog.trello.com/related-cards-related-boards

What this means is that you have an "overview board" that has one card per board, with the board linked to that card. You can then see the full board title (because it is a card title) and use this overview board to store "meta" information about those boards.

This "board of board" approach is actually the example I use in my article introducing the Trellinator automation framework:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-articles/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

[Emily Hughes]

Thanks for the response! It's a good idea, and I've set up a board of boards called "overview board" ...However, with this solution you don't get the visual notification that there has been new activity, so you would have to go into each board by board and look on the cards, so it doesn't really solve my problem.

So many notifications are being missed, we need to be able to see all our boards at a glance, but also at a glance have that visual cue about which boards have new activity

[Iain Dooley]

@Emily Hughes okay this will be a multi-part answer with a multi-part solution.

So bear with me :)

The fundamental problem with Trello notifications is that there are too many of them and too many of them are irrelevant.

This is due to the fact that when you're added to a card, you automatically "watch" that card and thus, whenever anyone sneezes in the vicinity of that card you get a notification. Watching lists and boards is similar.

So the first step to missing fewer notifications is to *have* fewer notifications.

The second problem with Trello notifications is that the notifications drawer/section doesn't allow you to prioritise your responses, so you either have to leave things unread in which case they build up, or you need to respond to everything straight away.

Somewhat related to this is the fact that the "cards" view where you can go to see all the cards you're a member of across all boards doesn't allow you to reprioritise the cards at all.

You can prioritise in the context of an individual project but each person is unable to adequately prioritise their own work within the context of all the stuff they have on their plate.

Ultimately this leads to an attempt to use due dates to prioritise because that's the only sorting option available on the cards view, which creates excessive administrative overhead because in reality most of the work we do is on an "ASAP" basis; you end up creating a bunch of arbitrary and fake deadlines for prioritisation purposes which lessens the impact of actual deadlines that exist as real world constraints and require constant updating (or you just live in the "overdue zone").

This problem isn't unique to Trello, it exists in all task management systems.

HOWEVER, Trello has a leg up on those competitors because it's so damned customisable.

The first part of my solution for you therefore is an integration I wrote called Benko Board which addresses these issues with notifications and the cards view:

https://trello.com/integrations/#benkoboard

1) When you're added to a card it automatically unsubscribes you from that card. This means that you only get notified about being added to or removed from a card or board, and mentioned in a comment. This dramatically reduces the total number of notifications you receive and means that the notifications you do see are more likely to be relevant, but it does require some behaviour change if people have the expectation that everyone will see their comments without being mentioned by name (since so many notifications are being missed at the moment that doesn't sound like a barrier). It also requires G-Suite (which anyone interested in productivity should be using anyway IMHO ;)

2) When you're added to a card or mentioned in a comment, a linked notification card is created in your "Benko Board" which is each person's "one board to rule them all". This board can also be fully integrated with Gmail so that all your emails appear in the same place, too (and you can send and receive emails from Trello, using it as a complete email client for Gmail). This means that your Benko Board becomes both your notification centre AND your cards view, with each card linked back to the source of the notification.

No-one will ever miss a notification again and everyone can easily prioritise their work across all projects.

That's thing one: it fixes the problem you're having with visibility and notifications running a bunch of projects.

Additionally, since you have a board of boards, you can run all sorts of useful reporting to give you data at a glance from your overview board, using the API.

For example, here is a Trellinator command that will execute daily to add the "New Activity" label to any card in your overview board where any card in the linked board has had a comment or been moved between lists within the past day:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/3d9e7110b3023fb7fbf3cab532c6aa6c

Trellinator is an open source library for automating Trello with Google Apps Script that I created, you can read how to set it up here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-articles/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271