How do I customize a feed?

Control which content appears from a feed and how it's displayed.

Every feed has its own settings where you can control what content appears and how it's displayed.

Opening feed settings

  1. From the Home tab, tap the More menu in the top right.
  2. Tap Settings, then tap Feeds.
  3. Tap the feed you want to customize.

Sources

LightWatch pulls images and videos from several places within a feed. Each source can be toggled on or off individually under Configure feed content:

  • Body — Images embedded in the post body text.
  • Description — Images from the feed's description field.
  • Thumbnail — Official feed thumbnails.
  • Media — Explicit media elements declared by the feed (via media:content in RSS).
  • Linked Article — Images from the full article page. Requires article content to be enabled.

While this feature allows LightWatch to import all available media, it can lead to duplicate content. When a feed is added, the app tries to figure out which source is the primary source and disables the others. If it gets it wrong, you can toggle them as needed. Enable the feed preview to see the sources for each media item to get a better idea of where each comes from.

Filters

Filters let you exclude content you don't want in your gallery. This is useful for feeds that include things like social icons or buttons in their posts that manage to pass all of the automatic filters that try to exclude them by default. Tap Configure filters to set them up.

Content filters

Content filters exclude posts or items based on text matching. Each filter has:

  • Type — Text match (contains) or regex.
  • Context — What to match against: post title, post URL, or item URL.
  • Action — Exclude matching content.

This is useful for filtering out posts by keyword or hiding content from specific URL patterns.

Position filters

Position filters let you exclude the first or last images from each post. This is helpful for posts that consistently start or end with content you don’t want to include.

Suggested filters

LightWatch may suggest filters based on patterns it detects in the feed. These appear in the Suggested Filters section and can be added with a tap.

Display options

Under Options, you can control how the feed appears in your galleries:

  • Hide Feed — Hides the feed behind biometric authentication.
  • Hide Post Titles — Hides post titles in the focus gallery.
  • Group by Post — Controls whether multi-image posts are grouped. Can be set to Auto (follows global setting), On, or Off. See How do I group images by their post? for more.
  • Max New Posts — Limits how many new posts are added per update. Defaults to 25. This is mostly a safety measure for the app, but is customizable if you have a feed that provides more posts than the default.

Channels

Under Channels, you can assign the feed to one or more channels. See How do I organize my feeds? for more.