Official YouTube Blog: thumbnails

Official Blog

Looking ahead in the YouTube player

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Pssst!certain momentOver the coming weeks, you’ll be able to see an image preview or a series of thumbnails with three new features on our video player. Taking a sneak peek Scanning through thumbnails Zooming in on long videosmovies on YouTubeLife in a Day an hour of videoNundu Janakiram, product manager, recently watched “Brush With Death.”

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Labels: new features , thumbnails

Thumbnails: Your video’s billboard on YouTube

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

This is part of an ongoing series sharing tips from the YouTube Creator Playbook, a resource of best practices and tips you can start using on your channel and videos right away. As we move along in this series, some posts will be focused for more advanced YouTubers or YouTube Partners, like this week’s tip.Thumbnail Basics1. Your thumbnail should look good, either scaled small or large

Faces work better and engage the audience

Visuals of the finished product work better than the process (e.g. show the cake, rather a picture of the batter)

Good thumbnails follow the same rule as good photographs - composition, contrast, and color count

Average Betty (food)

2. Choose images that accurately portray your video’s content

Accurate thumbnails allow viewers to more easily browser and enjoy your content.

Misleading thumbnails lead to poor audience engagement and will hurt your channel’s performance in the long run

Safeguards are in place to find and penalize channels that upload racy thumbnails—take a look at our Community Guidelines for more information

TMZ (entertainment)

3. For channels with the ability to upload custom thumbnails, upload a high quality image

There is no limit on pixel size (though 1280x720 is recommended)

The image file has to be less than 2MB

Accepted file formats: PNG, BMP, GIF, or JPEG

vsauce (multiple genres)Thumbnail PlacementYouTube AnalyticsYouTube Creator PlaybookAndres Palmiter, Audience Development Strategist, recently watched “Todd Kuiken: A prosthetic arm that ‘feels’.”