Thumbnail from a YouTube video

What it's for

To grab a video's cover, analyze your competitors' thumbnails or reuse your own elsewhere. It works with normal links, Shorts and embeds.

Note

The thumbnail is taken from YouTube's public server. If the «Max» version doesn't exist, the «High» one is shown automatically.

What makes a thumbnail readable

It is looked at two or three centimetres wide on a phone, in a grid alongside twenty others. At that size a detailed photograph becomes a smudge: what survives are large shapes, strong contrast and at most three or four words in thick lettering.

The test to run is trivial and hardly anyone does it: shrink your thumbnail to that size and look at it next to others. If you cannot tell what it is about in an instant, it does not work, however polished it looks full screen. A face with a clear expression nearly always works, because the human eye finds faces before anything else.

Why the thumbnail counts for more than the title

The two work together, but the eye reaches the image first: the title is read only if the thumbnail has already stopped the gaze. Hence the most useful rule: do not repeat the title in the thumbnail. If the title says «How to clean a coffee machine», the thumbnail must not write the same words: it has to show the limescale.

The two parts have to complete each other: one asks the question and the other gives the context, or one shows the result and the other says how long it takes. When they say the same thing, half the available space has been spent twice.

The sizes and formats you need

The standard is 1280 by 720 pixels, that is 16:9, with a size limit around two megabytes. Uploading a larger image achieves nothing, uploading a smaller one makes it grainy on televisions, where the same thumbnail is displayed very large.

Account has to be taken of what the interface covers too: the video duration appears at the bottom right, and on some screens a rounded corner eats the edges. Text should therefore be kept away from the margins and from the bottom right corner, which is exactly where many people put it.

The rules not to break

A thumbnail is part of the content and follows the same rules: an image promising something the video does not contain is a deception and is penalised, not only by the audience leaving but by the platform as well. And images taken from a film, a match or another channel are protected material, exactly as a song would be.

Finally there is a legitimate use of this tool and one that is not: recovering the cover of your own video to reuse elsewhere is normal; downloading somebody else's to study its framing and colours is normal; republishing it as your own is not.

Nearby tools

For the title there is Title generator, for chapters Chapter generator and for income Earnings estimate. On the image work Resize photo, Write on a photo and Frame from video.